My name is Will and I write from the perspective of a non-Indigenous male from Wiradjuri Country. This perspective is informed by my current Politics, Philosophy and Economics degree, where I major in Philosophy and minor in Indigenous studies. With a keen interest in policy writing, I am excited to apply a critical lens to this nation’s settler-colony and my role within it.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are advised that the following post contains stories of Aboriginal people now passed. It also deals with stories of violence and colonial brutality.

As a non-Indigenous settler, I live and write on a Country rightfully owned by the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples. I acknowledge and celebrate the First Peoples on whose lands you read this piece, and whose cultures are among the oldest continuing cultures in human history. I pay my respects to elders, past and present, whose sovereignty has never been ceded. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.

Today marks the 187th anniversary of one of the bloodiest events in Western Australian colonial history.

 

Since the arrival of the British Colony of Western Australia in 1829, the local Pinjarup Nyoongar people had bravely resisted the colony’s disturbances to their territory, sources of food, and life on the Murray River. But the success of the newfound colony hinged on pastoral expansion, profit, and the imperial desire to replace First Peoples communities with settler communities south of Perth.

 

This tension—between colonial logic and the rights of First Peoples to the land—had dire consequences for the Pinjarup people. The first governor of Western Australia, James Stirling, relentlessly sought to break the resistance of the Nyoongar people and ‘reduce their tribe to weakness.’ 

 

This led Stirling—alongside 25 armed colonial officials and settlers—to ambush an unsuspecting group of Pinjarrup people on the Murray River. That morning, the colonists indiscriminately shot and killed between 15 to 80 Pinjarup Nyoongar People. 

The struggle to recognise the massacre

187 years on, debate about how to classify the events at Pinjarra still remains. While historians like Keith Windshuttle argue that Pinjarra was a “real battle between warring parties… rather than a massacre of innocents,” important witness accounts paint a much darker picture. JS Roe, the Western Australian surveyor general who joined Stirling at Pinjara, recounts cornering the “obnoxious tribe,” who were hiding among the “dead logs of the river banks.” This does little to depict a genuine battle between warring parties.

 

Indeed, Stirling’s own accounts prove that this was a massacre, which I define as the intentional killing of a large number of relatively defenceless people. Stirling wrote that through his actions, he had planned to “overawe the murray tribe” with “such acts of decisive severity as will appall them as people.” Yet, in the face of this cold brutality, the Murray Shire council decided, in the late 1990s, not to recognise Pinjarra as a massacre. It was not until 2006 that the events in 1834 were finally recognised as a massacre of a people who, in the words of current Shire president David Bolt, “weren’t really able to protect themselves.”

The struggle to memorialise the massacre

While there has been a push to acknowledge Pinjarra as a massacre, it seems yet to be properly memorialised as one. Atop the Battle of Pinjarra Memorial Park sits a rock with a plaque. The plaque does not make any mention of the word massacre. And when we think of the grandiosity of places like the Australian War Memorial, the Pinjarra Park pales in comparison as a memorial. Those like Murray Districts Aboriginal Association chair Karrie-Anne Kearing have long been waiting for recognition of names, stories and a place of learning for the Nyoongar people.  

The struggle to redress the pain of the massacre

Despite the visible scars that Stirling has left on Western Australia’s colonial history, his severely tainted legacy still lives on as the namesake of the Perth local council, the City of Stirling. In the face of enduring calls to rename the council out of respect for the Nyoongar People, the city council voted to keep the governor’s namesake. To continue to honour the architect of the massacre alienates, degrades, and dishonours those killed in the massacre, its survivors, and their descendants who still feel the effects of Stirling’s actions today. This is not about rewriting the history books; as Whadjuk Nyoongar Elder Len Collard exclaims, it is about properly filling in the pages of the history books so that “all experiences are reflected.”

The further inability of the settler-colony to recognise, redress, and relieve the pain felt by the community is ever present. On the anniversary of Pinjarra, the WA Police Union chose to commemorate, not the 15-80 dead Nyoongar people and their families, but the only casualty among the colonial officials. In the now-deleted tweet, the Union commemorated Captain Theophalus Ellis—who died either from being speared in the massacre or falling from his horse. Like the failure to rename the City of Stirling, this is a constant reminder of who are deemed worthy of commemoration in Western Australia and who are not. It’s little wonder that many Indigenous peoples are so disillusioned with the police.

 

When writing about the Pinjarra massacre and the Pinjarup Nyoongar people, James Stirling disturbingly described his desire to ‘reduce their tribe to weakness.’ And while the strong Pinjarup Nyoongar people have survived the massacre, let us not reduce their pain to a mere blemish on Western Australia’s colonial history that is not worthy of just recognition, memorialisation and redressal.