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One clear morning in 1838, 11 armed men on horseback rode into a cluster of huts on the western slopes of the New England Tablelands at a place called Myall Creek Station. There the men chained 30 Gamilaraay people together, pushed them into a stock yard, let go one musket shot and in the ensuing panic decapitated, stabbed and shot all but two little boys. The two youngsters scrambled through the wooden fence and ran as fast as their little legs could carry them into the cool refuge of Myall Creek.

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The young men of that Gamilaraay family were away over the hills on that fateful morning, working for the Myall Creek farmer. The murdered family were women, the elderly and their children. I’ve dreamed of the lives of the two little boys who ran away from the screaming deaths of their mothers, their siblings and their grandparents. The story goes that one of the little boys died of natural causes within two years of the Myall Creek Massacre. Maybe his heart broke. But the other little boy did survive. Now his direct descendants number in the hundreds.

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Aunty Sue Blacklock from Tingha is one of the living elders of that little boy.

Last year on the 10 June I travelled with my family to Myall Creek for the 181st anniversary commemoration of that massacre. Aunty Sue Blacklock hosts the most meaningful ceremony I have ever attended in my 46 years on this continent. We all cried. The brave descendants of the slain cried and the brave descendants of the perpetrators cried alongside them. Descendants of the slain talked of murder and of healing and descendants of the murderers gave the most emotionally powerful apology. Then into the evening we drank tea, played music, talked and celebrated the future together.

There are 312 recognised massacre sites on our country. The Port Arthur massacre of 1996 is the most recent and is commemorated poignantly and beautifully. A monument commemorates the Dharawal people murdered in the massacre of 1816 in Appin, and Aunty Sue Blacklock and a small committee successfully built the Myall Creek Massacre Memorial just off the the Bingara Road near Moree.

Every few years some drunken men come in the middle of the night and hack the word “murdered” from the bronze plaque at Myall Creek, but the stone the plaque is bolted to will stand sentry to the memory of the people killed for the next 10,000 years.

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We are very good at commemorating in Australia, rightfully commemorating the slaughter of Anzacs at Gallipoli, the deaths of hundreds of thousands in war at our war memorials, the bombing of Darwin, the landing of Dirk Hartog on the Western Australian coast and the legend of Don Bradman in Bowral. We’re good at building memorials for people, if you’re white.

In 2020 we need to continue the conversation around the recognition of the first massacres to take place, on our soil, in our midst. Germany rose from the ashes of the second world war not by denying history and ignoring commemoration – quite the opposite. Berlin is now again the cultural powerhouse of Europe precisely because of the sophisticated and meaningful commemoration the German people have created. It was not easy, nor was it comfortable, but it was profoundly successful, for a healthy community and for healing the past.

Every massacre site in our country should be recognised and it should be commemorated, for sanity, for goodness and for reconciliation.