In the first half of 1841, the Maraura people of the central Murray had a problem. Overlanders, large groups of men driving thousands of sheep and cattle along the overland stock route through their Country, were taking their water, destroying their food sources, and in documented cases, assaulting their women. The Maraura responded the only way available to them.

They fought back.

For six months, Maraura warriors conducted a coordinated campaign of raids along the Murray, ambushing overlander parties, taking sheep, and forcing convoy after convoy to retreat or change course. Contemporary accounts describe groups of three hundred or more warriors using their intimate knowledge of the Murray's islands and waterways to strike and withdraw in ways the overlanders could not counter. They were effective. They were winning.

This episode tells the full story of the Rufus River massacre of August 1841, and the six months of organised Aboriginal resistance that preceded it. We talk about who the Maraura people were and what was being done to their Country, including the part the colonial press deliberately suppressed at the time, that overlanders had been entering into arrangements with Maraura women, promising food and goods in exchange for sexual access, and then failing to honour those promises. When Maraura men confronted them about it, the confrontations escalated. The resistance campaign that followed was not random violence. It was a response to specific, documented wrongs.

We also talk about the punitive expedition the South Australian government sent to end it, led by police and joined by armed civilians, accompanied by the Protector of Aborigines who tried to mediate and failed, and the massacre of at least thirty to forty Maraura people on the banks of the river that ended six months of effective resistance in a single afternoon.

No one was charged. The overland route stayed open. And a hundred and seventy two years later, the Federal Court formally recognised what the Maraura had always known about who that Country belonged to.

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.