On the night of the 7th of November 1894, a police constable named Bill Richardson was sleeping at Lillimooloora Police Station in the Kimberley. Beside him, acting as guard and trusted tracker, was a young Bunuba man who had spent years working alongside him. A man Richardson considered his most reliable partner.

That night, the Bunuba prisoners chained nearby talked to him through the darkness. They were his own people. They reminded him who he was.

Before dawn, Jandamarra shot Richardson dead. He freed the prisoners. He armed them from the station's own stockpile. And he disappeared into the Kimberley landscape he had known since childhood, beginning a three-year guerrilla campaign that would make him one of the most celebrated resistance fighters in Australian history.

This episode tells the full story of Jandamarra, the Bunuba man whom colonists called Pigeon. We talk about Bunuba country, the ancient limestone gorges and cave systems of the Kimberley that gave Jandamarra a tactical advantage no outside force could match, and about what was happening to that country in the 1880s and 1890s as pastoral expansion pushed hard into territory the ranges had previously protected. We talk about how a young man ends up tracking his own people for the colonial police, and what it costs when he is finally forced to choose between the two worlds he has been living between.

We follow the three-year campaign through its key turning points. The battle at Windjana Gorge. The wound his opponents reported as fatal that he survived in the caves, hidden by his mother. The two more raids on Lillimooloora that proved he was still there. And the end at Tunnel Creek on the 1st of April 1897, when he was finally shot dead at around twenty three years old, after which the police cut off his head and sent it to England.

His story was kept alive by Bunuba people for more than a century before the rest of the country began to catch up.

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.