Terrible stories of atrocities included in an updated map and archive of Australia’s massacres

This article is more than 10 months old

This article is more than 10 months old

Aboriginal people were forced to collect wood for their own pyres in at least four cases of mass killing in Western Australia, a practice that was still happening as late as 1926, new research reveals.

The Killing Times – a collaboration between Guardian Australia and the University of Newcastle’s colonial frontier massacre research team – has found that some of the most violent episodes in our colonial past took place well into the 1920s, in the Northern Territory and Western Australia.

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Government forces, including soldiers, police, magistrates and native police, were involved in more than half of all massacres recorded between the 1820s and the 1930s.

The Killing Times map has been updated today with 57 new sites. With this broader national picture we can reveal:

About 97% of people killed in these massacres were Aboriginal men, women and children

Massacres became more violent, systematic and calculated over time

The average number of Indigenous deaths increased over time, before declining in the 1900s, but massacres continued up to 1928

Colonist deaths in massacres stop almost entirely from the early 1900s onwards

Reprisal for killing civilians was the most common justification, with 111 attacks sparked by the death of a colonist

“Opportunity” attacks were the second most common, and the majority were planned with government involvement or sanction

At least 65 massacres of Indigenous people were in retaliation for the killing or theft of livestock, or theft of property

“Just about all of the massacres in the first 30 years [of colonisation] are carried out by government forces,” said Prof Lyndall Ryan, who heads the University of Newcastle research team. “There’s always police involved in the story, right across Australia.

“As the frontier starts to expand, it’s less likely to be British soldiers, but soldiers who’ve left the regiment and been appointed as magistrates, or mounted police.

“They don’t lose their military bearing, let’s put it that way.”

Events were recorded in graphic detail in newspapers, journals, court documents and even a 1926 royal commission but, with the exception of Myall Creek in New South Wales in 1838, no perpetrators were ever convicted.

At Mount Bryan in South Australia in 1844, William Carter killed an Aboriginal family, including a pregnant woman and her unborn child. Carter reported it in horrific detail to magistrates. He was never charged with a crime; the magistrates said “the whites appear to have acted with great moderation.”

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At York, WA, in 1837, a pastoralist kept ears as souvenirs after a killing for which nobody was tried or convicted. The Swan River Guardian newspaper described the actions – endorsed by the military, led by Lieutenant Bunbury – as medieval.

Barbarities of the Middle Age have been committed even by boys and servants, who shot the unarmed woman, the unoffensive child, and the men who kindly showed them the road in the bush; the ears of the corpses have been cut off, and hung up in the kitchen of a gentleman, as a signal of triumph.

The Swan River Guardian, 16 November 1837

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More than 20 massacres took place in the 20th century – half of them in the years after the first world war. The accounts of these later killings – as told by perpetrators as well as survivors – are utterly horrifying.

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The late Hector Chunda Jandany’s father and grandfather were killed by colonists in the Kimberley. The Gija artist and senior lawman often spoke and painted about what happened.

Of the Jail House creek killings in 1900, Chunda said: “some kartiya [white people] bin round em up the blackfellas, put em chains around their necks. They used to drive em like a mob of cattle. They took em to the right place, Jail Creek. Then they were carting woodback to the place where they were camping, then tie them up, like a dog.

“All the kartiya get em their guns, line em up every girl and boy and shoot em down. Whang, all the children on the rocks. [Smash their skulls on the rocks.] Chuck em kerosene, put em on the firewood and chuck all em them dead bodies in the firewood place, put em kerosene and chuck em matches.

“Kartiya bin finish em up, killed the lot.”

Aboriginal people were killed and their bodies burned at Panton River in the east Kimberley in the 1880s, and again at Kariyarri in the Pilbara in the 1890s.

At Linnekar Gorge in 1896 a descendant of survivors, David Turner, said “kartiya come there to shoot blackfellas for no reason. Gather all the blackfellas and tie em up with chains. Told blackfellas to get all the wood, stack em on the wood heapStarted shooting the blackfellas with the chains (still on). They had a bottle of kerosene and just pour em on and burn it up.”

The practice continued well into the 20th century.

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In 1924, according to oral history passed down by survivors, a group of Gija and Worla men were convicted of killing a bullock at Bedford Downs station. They were sent back to the station with “tickets” around their necks as a label of their guilt. Some removed the tickets before they reached the station, others left them on. When they arrived, those who still had their tickets on were sent to a remote area to chop wood. After spending the morning chopping wood, they were given food poisoned with strychnine, causing them to die painfully. Their bodies were then burned. Two men who refused to eat escaped. They, along with two women who had also witnessed the killings, passed on this story.

These recounts are told with brutal simplicity. Ryan believes it is a sign that “the hatred of Aboriginal people after world war one seems to have intensified”.

“Racism has become more profound. It’s more acceptable, more articulate.

“Everything is more ruthless, as if the compassion has gone,” Ryan says. “This is hard, ruthless country, no holds barred.”

She adds: “These are professional killers, by the time we get into the 20th century. The Boer war and world war one seem to have a big impact on the way massacres are carried out. And that’s to do with better gun technology, like long-range rifles.”

At the same time, Ryan says, Aboriginal labour was needed to build the frontier, so “there’s a lot of contradiction going on”.

“They always know it’s wrong,” Ryan says. “On the one hand, the authorities in Broome or Darwin are saying “massacre is illegal” but they all seem to be doing it, and nobody’s brought to justice.

“You do find some of the press in Western Australia expressing concern . But most of the stations in the Kimberley are actually owned by politicians in the West Australian parliament.

“Most of the massacres in the Northern Territory, even after 1911, are carried out on pastoral leasesowned by politicians in South Australia, the pillars of South Australian society.

“It’s happening on their cattle stations, prominent South Australians.”

The historical records show that it takes some perpetrators decades to talk about what took place. Ryan believes the need to bear witness is a great burden on them, that seems to weigh heavier with time.

“The whole thing about massacres is the code of silence that is imposed in the immediate aftermath,” Ryan explains. “Many people are too frightened to speak. Aboriginal people won’t speak. They might get killed themselves.

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“Some of the perpetrators might feel badly but they’re not going to say anything immediately afterwards. They might talk 20 or 30 years later, when all fear of being killed or being arrested has gone.

“Often it’s the young men who are in their late teens or early 20s, who’re not the leaders of the massacre but part of the hunting group. Sometimes when they’re married, and children of their own appear, they suddenly realise they’ve killed a little Aboriginal child and I think it really weighs on them.

“The need to tell becomes terribly important.”

The Killing Times is just the beginning of research into the frontier. There are still many sites awaiting verification, particularly in Queensland and the Northern Territory.

“We’ll never have the whole list but what we’ve got is really confronting enough,” Ryan says.

“The cover-up has been so profound and this is just a very important part of it. The cover-up of massacres is an important part of white Australia.”

The Killing Times is based on data from the Colonial Frontier Massacre Digital Map Project led by Prof Lyndall Ryan at the University of Newcastle’s Centre for the 21st Century Humanities.

For more information about the analysis conducted by Guardian Australia and the research methods of the University of Newcastle’s colonial frontier massacre research team, please read the about section here.

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