Lest we forget: The Coniston Massacre

Coniston is well-documented. On the subject of massacres, historian Keith Windschuttle comforted the comfortable by denying many massacres really happened. He did this by taking a forensic approach, looking for evidence that would stand up in a court of law. Few massacres passed his tests and there has been much debate that lack of official records may mean just that - lack of official records - rather than evidence that massacres didn’t happen. But Coniston was well documented and Windschuttle found plenty of evidence and stated in Quadrant that a significant number of innocent Aborigines lost their lives and that Coniston deserves to be known as a genuine massacre.

So why don’t we know about it? It is unlikely that Australians will ever forget Gallipoli and every year it is commemorated across the nation on Anzac Day. Gallipoli, and its meaning or interpretation, is also taught in schools and each year Australians, including many young people, travel to Gallipoli to remember the Australians who fought there.

There’s a sense that Gallipoli helped shape the nation but other events that shaped the nation have been forgotten. There have been times when Australians have been mown down and left to die and instead of being mourned by the nation, they have been forgotten. One difference is that these were the first Australians. For them Lest We Forget became Best We Forget as Australia developed amnesia.

Ironically we lost at Gallipoli and “won” at Coniston. With the original inhabitants subdued the way was clear for the new settlers, yet we commemorate our defeat and are deafeningly quiet about our win.

No one will ever know the true figure of the dead, although it is indisputably high. Aboriginal people who weren’t killed outright, but were injured, had no access to hospitals, and their own medicine didn’t equip them to deal with bullet wounds. Most likely they died. Murray shot to kill. At the enquiry he said, “What use is a wounded black feller a hundred miles from civilisation”.

We don’t teach our children about Coniston, we don’t have a minute’s silence to reflect on its meaning, and in fact as a nation we haven’t given it a minute at all. Perhaps we like to remember our heroic moments and forget our ugly past but we are talking about the recent past here, something that happened in the life times of people still alive today. According to Neale, “we are talking about two or three generations of oppression, segregation and dispossession”.

Murray surely must be one of the worst mass murderers this country has ever known but his name doesn’t come up on lists of Australia’s serial killers. Perhaps it is because although he admitted to 31 killings he was never convicted. It’s another shameful event in Australia’s history that he was exonerated.

An enquiry was held. Murray had ridden into camps shouting, "Drop your weapons in the name of the King". The Aborigines, who had had little contact with whites, spoke little or no English. Murray shot them if they didn’t immediately lay down their wooden weapons, shot them if they tried to fight back and shot them if they tried to run away.

Incredibly an enquiry concluded Murray killed in self-defence. The Tasmanian Mercury newspaper of January 31, 1929, reported that “the Board found that no provocation had been given to the aborigines that could account for their attacks on white men”. The enquiry would have us believe that Murray rode into one camp, was attacked and shot the attackers; then rode into a second camp, was attacked and shot the attackers; then rode into a third camp; then a fourth; then a fifth.

The spark for the massacre was the reported killing of a white man called Fred Brooks by an indigenous man known as Bullfrog. Mr. J.C. Cawood, Government Resident of Central Australia sent Mounted Constable George Murray to investigate. Bullfrog fled and lived until the 1970s but the official count was 17 dead. Innocence or guilt didn’t seem to have anything to do with it.

With further attacks the rationale wasn’t the death of a human; it was the death of cattle. In a place where life was hard at any time the drought and the pressure cattle put on resources meant food shortages for the local people. The Sydney Morning Herald in September 1928 reported that “marauding natives” were killing cattle and settlers were appealing for help. Help arrived in the form of Murray and his posse.

1928 is not that long ago, but the punishment for killing cattle was death, and the punishment for killing Aboriginal people was non-existent. Even worse than that, it wasn’t just the cattle killers who were killed. It was anyone, from a number of different tribal groups, whose camps were found by the posse.