Un-whitewashing history: The Coniston Massacre

Trigger warning: readers – particularly First Nations – are warned that the following article details incidents of murder and violence and may be distressing. Quotes from historical records include deeply problematic terminology. The article also contains the names of people who have passed.

Un-whitewashing history: The Coniston Massacre

The Coniston Massacre is the last known massacre of First Nations in Australia. 

Lives were lost to a senseless killing spree led by a local police officer following the murder of a White man. 

What happened is not etched in the history books of White Australia, but on the desert sand of the Warlpiri, Anmatyerre and Kaytetye (Kaytej) nations.

The official death toll, as reported to the Board of Enquiry in January 1929, was 31.

That was likely a gross underestimate.  

The number of Warlpiri, Anmatyerre and Kaytetye people who were brutally massacred around Coniston and remote central Australia between August and October 1928 was never officially counted, nor have the victims ever been identified or remembered in any historical records.

At its conclusion, that same Board of Enquiry found that the murder of 31 First Nations – now known as the Coniston Massacre – was justified on the grounds of ‘self-defence’.  

But what happened was indefensible.

The Coniston Massacre was a ‘reprisal’ for the murder of a White dingo trapper, Fred Brooks, whose body was found half-buried in a rabbit burrow near Yurrkuru soak on August 7, 1928.

Coniston is the name of the property on which that murder took place. Coniston, however, is situated on Warlpiri land.  

Brooks’ murder was committed by a small group of First Nations men who were camping nearby. That much has never been disputed.

The reason for Brooks’ murder, however, has long been a point of contention.

According to Randal Stafford, the leaseholder at Coniston and a long-time friend of Brooks, his is what occurred:

Now this is what happened — and it shows that one can never trust any of these bush blacks: their minds must work differently from ours. A party of myalls came in one night, and later came and asked him for some food. While Fred was giving it to them, they all jumped on him and attacked him. One of the gins held him by the hands,while some of the men hacked him down with their tomahawks. Then they stuffed his  body down a rabbit burrow, and took all the stores from his camp.

Interestingly, though, there wasn’t a single non-Indigenous witness to Brooks murder, not even Stafford. From where did Stafford’s version of events originate?

Many White pastoralists at the time believed that Brooks was the first victim of a long-feared ‘Black uprising’. According to the stories, an entirely fictional tribe named the ‘Warramulla’ were hunting innocent White people.

Stafford’s account certainly supported that theory of a Black uprising.  

Other accounts suggest Brooks sexually assaulted one of the perpetrator’s wives.

In 1928, breaking Indigenous marriage law was a ‘punishable offence’ and dealt with according to cultural traditions. This approximate version of events has been shared and verified by several Warlpiri, including the long-alleged mastermind’s granddaughter.

As Michael Bradley details in his book, Coniston, no eyewitnesses to Brooks’ murder were ever questioned.

What happened at Yurrkuru soak that day may have been lost to the historical records, though it has always been firmly ingrained in the collective memory of the Warlpiri, Anmatyerre and Kaytetye people. 

But one thing is for certain: in the aftermath of Brooks’ murder, entire groups of First Nations who had no connection to the events at Coniston were victims of a racially targeted killing spree.

When news of the murder reached police in Alice Springs, Mounted Constable George Murray, who was attending to police business near Alice Springs, was sent to investigate.

Murray, a police officer and former soldier who ‘received no [police] training’, had a reputation among First Nations at his post in Barrow Creek as ‘a bit rough’ and ‘quick to start a fight’.

It was Murray who led the Coniston Massacre.

After making some enquiries, Murray reported to his superior in Alice Springs that he had made significant progress with the investigation: ‘I ascertained the names of twenty adult male aboriginals whom it is alleged were implicated in the murder’.

These twenty perpetrators were never identified by name, nor was the name of the source or sources who accused them.

But this wasn’t a case of police incompetence. As far as Murray was concerned, it didn’t matter who the real perpetrators were. Everyone would pay a price for the murder of a White man. 

Murray fabricated that report to his superior, of that there can be little doubt.

But things turned especially grim when his ‘investigation’ – negligible as it was – soon became violent.

The group of men Murray gathered to assist with the investigation came well-armed. It must have been a non-issue, then, that none were qualified or authorised to conduct police business.

Between August 14 and October 18, they searched remote Central Australia on horseback for the mobs with links to the Brooks murder.

So Murray claimed.

Murray’s tactical strategy was invariably an ambush wherever he turned up.

Unsurprisingly, ambush was invariably met with concerned mobs who took up their weapons.

The use of weapons by mobs was always Murray’s justification for shooting.

And shoot they did.

While the official death toll as reported to that Board of Enquiry was 31, the unofficial count is much higher.

The National Museum of Australia estimates there were more than 60 fatalities, but locals say more.

The number of locations where known shootings occurred is extensive: Yurrkuru; Rabbit Bore; Mt Theo; Tipinpa; White Stone; Boundary Soak; Cockatoo Spring; Mission Creek; Mt Denison; Curlew Waterhole; Dingo Waterhole; Tomahawk Waterhole; Boomerang Waterhole; Broadmeadows; Circle Well and Baxter’s Well.

While at some locations Murray and his men managed to capture (rather than kill) some prisoners, almost all of them succumbed to fatal gunshot wounds.

The following report from Murray demonstrates the inhumane indifference with which prisoners were treated:

I examined the prisoners and found that they were very seriously wounded. I also informed the rest of the party of their condition. We then had lunch. The two wounded died during our lunch hour. We then returned to Cockatoo Spring.

Of all the prisoners captured, two, Akirkra and Padygar, who allegedly made separate confessions, were transported to Darwin where they stood trial for Brooks’ murder.

They didn’t speak English and were ‘unrepresented’.

The proceedings did not go as planned. Bradley lays bare just how little Murray thought due diligence would factor in the trial of two First Nations men:

[Murray] was questioned in detail about the supposed confessions made by Padygar   and Akirkra after he had arrested them, conceding that they had been chained by the neck, had witnessed other Aboriginal men being shot by Murray, and had at no time been cautioned. More importantly, their confessions had supposedly been made to Major and then translated for Murray, who spoke nothing of their language; but Major   had not been called as a witness. Now Justice Mallam got stuck in, interrogating Murray about the bizarre proceedings before Magistrate Allchurch in Alice Springs. While Padygar and Akirkra had reportedly made admissions of guilt there, no written record of these statements had been brought to Darwin.

Due to the lack of documentation and evidence, both men had to be acquitted.

Coniston was the last of the Killing Times, an era characterised by at least 270 frontier, often ‘state-sanctioned’ massacres, perpetrated by police and White settlers.

The Board of Enquiry, tasked with investigating the massacre at Coniston, was only ever formed because of the negative public response to media coverage, particularly the bungled trial of Akirkra and Padygar.

The government of the time, led by Prime Minister Stanley Bruce, was unabashedly in favour of the White Australia Policy and dedicated to preserving the ‘98 percent British character’ of Australia. 

According to Bradley, due to ‘changing times’, the news of events like Coniston could no longer be ‘suppressed’. And, when that news broke in far-away Australian capital cities and even in other countries, there was a public outcry. 

But the systemic racism embedded within government institutions meant there was no recourse for what happened.

After all, the Coniston Massacre centres on the experiences of the White men, among them a police officer, who claim they were only killed in self-defence.

The Board of Inquiry did not hear from a single member of the Warlpiri, Anmatyerre and Kaytetye nations.

By silencing First Nations voices we have whitewashed the record, like so much of our history – starting with the declaration of terra nullius.

Not until Warlpiri elder, Central Land Council Chairman and filmmaker Francis Jupurrurla Kelly made the 2012 docu-drama Coniston have First Nations people with knowledge of the events ever been given the chance to share their stories.

“Everyone ‘round here knows about the Coniston Massacre – not from the books but from the people who were there, telling the stories,” he says.

Around Australia, however, the number of people who know about Coniston is significantly less.

In an interview with National Indigenous Times, Kelly expressed that education about our shameful history is lacking.

“Too few people know about it. I think they would be shocked if they knew. We want everyone to know that these murders did not happen during some distant past but 10 years after the First World War ended.”

The Coniston Massacre occurred two years after the birth of my father’s mother. It is very much modern history. 

But, until I was asked to write this article, I had never heard about it.   

I am appalled that such a significant event – and the Killing Times more broadly – have been excluded from our history curriculum.

I am sickened at the justification of killing innocent people as self-defence. 

Of course, I already knew that hundreds of First Nations were massacred upon colonisation.

I knew that violence against First Nations was common in the early years.

But what I didn’t know was that massacres occurred right up until 1928.

Today, deaths in custody have carried on that legacy.

The impact of this ongoing legacy of violence and racism is expertly articulated by Tony McAvoy, Australia’s first Indigenous Special Counsel, in a segment on NITV’s The Point:

“There’s something really important about trauma that people who ask you to forget don’t understand. When you are living with a continual re-agitation of that trauma, you cannot let it go.”

Public attitudes towards racism acknowledging our dark history are slowly changing for the better. 

Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians are more in favour of reconciliation than ever before, just as there is a growing acknowledgement of the prevalence of racism history in this country.

There is, however, a long way to go. 

Truth-telling is the only way to move forward and heal for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

This sentiment is echoed by many, including Murray’s own family.

Liza Dale-Hallett is Murray’s great-niece.

She first attended the Coniston 75th anniversary commemoration in 2003, and again on the 90th anniversary in 2018 with her brother and their respective partners.

In an interview with The Guardian, Dale-Hallett explained that acknowledging the past is important for all Australians:

“I’m not interested in identifying myself with my great-uncle, but I am absolutely interested in identifying myself, as an Australian, with the real ugliness of the history of settlement and these frontier wars,” she says.

“We have got stuck with this ugly part of our national history and we are unable to move beyond that point, to value Aboriginal cultures. It’s a roadblock… We’ve got to get past it, to say it happened, and we want to say sorry. Then the healing can happen, because the heart is open.”

Kelly agrees.

“Until all Australians know about the crimes committed against our families and many others during hundreds of documented colonial massacres we can’t move forward as one mob, one country. Other countries with murderous pasts have managed to come together by telling the truth. I don’t think it’s beyond Australia to do the same,” he says.

 

About the Author 

My name is Alix, and I am a non-Indigenous Australian currently undertaking a Master of Writing, Editing and Publishing at the University of Queensland. I am also the creator of the social justice news website, https://www.thestoriesthatmatter.com/. I am passionate about equality and learning how to become truly anti-racist.  

I would like to acknowledge the Yuggera and Turrbal people on whose land I write, and pay my respects to all First Nations – the sovereigns of this land.