On the west coast of South Australia, near the small town of Elliston, there is a coastal walking trail along the top of a series of steep cliffs. The views are spectacular. On a plaque along that trail is the word massacre.

Getting that word onto that plaque took more than a hundred and sixty years. It divided the town. A significant portion of the local community did not want it there. They petitioned to have it changed to conflict, to tragedy, to incident. Anything softer. Anything that left more room for doubt.

The word massacre is there because the Wirangu people insisted on it. And because enough of the town finally agreed they were right.

This episode tells the story of the Waterloo Bay massacre of May 1849, one of the most contested events in South Australian colonial history, and the community fight over its recognition that continued into the twenty-first century. We talk about the Wirangu people and their Country on the western Eyre Peninsula, about the poisonings and killings that preceded the massacre, and about the confrontation at the cliff tops where the official record describes three deaths and the Wirangu oral tradition, maintained consistently across generations, describes very many more.

We also talk about why the gap between those two accounts matters so much, and why the geography of that cliff top, bodies falling into the ocean below steep cliffs, means the absence of documentary evidence for a larger scale killing is not the same as evidence it didn't happen.

We talk about the Wirangu families who took long detours around Elliston entirely for generations because passing through the town meant passing the site of what happened there. And we talk about what it meant when the Elliston council finally chose to listen, building a trail along those same cliffs and putting the right word on the plaque.

The Wirangu people did not need the plaque to know what happened. They always knew. The plaque is for everyone else.

This podcast is recorded on Wadjuk Nyoongar Country. We acknowledge the Wadjuk Nyoongar people as the Traditional Custodians of the land this show is made on, and pay our respects to their Elders, past and present.

This is a 3 Brothers Production.