Episode 26: The Brewarrina Massacre and Mission

Before the British arrived, Brewarrina was one of the most important gathering places on the eastern half of this continent. The fish traps at the centre of town, Baiame's Ngunnhu, built by the Ngemba people across the Barwon River, are at least forty thousand years old. Archaeologists believe they may be the oldest human-made structure on earth. They drew nations from across the region, up to five thousand people at a time, to fish, trade, hold ceremony, and gather together on Country.

In 1859, somewhere around three hundred of those people were shot dead at a place called Hospital Creek, ten kilometres north east of the town. The creek got its name from the massacre itself, a settler shorthand for the scale of the wounded and the dead. It took a hundred and thirty six years for anyone to put a marker there.

This episode tells two stories that belong together. The Hospital Creek massacre of 1859, one of the largest single acts of mass killing against Aboriginal people in New South Wales, and the Brewarrina Aboriginal Mission that followed it, the first institution formally established by the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Board, where the Ngemba and neighbouring nations were confined for more than eighty years under the same instruments of control this show has covered before. Rationed food instead of wages. Children in dormitories away from their parents. Mail read before it was sent. Permission required to leave.

We also talk about the death of Lloyd James Boney in police custody in 1987, the riot it triggered, and the role Brewarrina played in pushing the national conversation that produced the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

And we talk about the colonial logic of taking one of the great open gathering places of the eastern continent and turning it into a closed containment facility for the people who had always lived there.

The fish traps are still in the Barwon River. The Ngemba are still their custodians.

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.