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.

On the 29th of December 2015, a twenty six year old Dunghutti man named David Dungay Junior was in the mental health ward of Long Bay Prison Hospital in Sydney. He had a packet of biscuits and rice crackers. He was eating them.

Prison staff told him to stop because of his diabetes. He refused. Six members of the Immediate Action Team were called. They moved him to a different cell, held him face down on the bed, and injected him with a sedative.

Throughout this, David Dungay Jr said the words I cannot breathe. He said them twelve times. An officer responded: if you can talk, you can breathe.

Minutes later, he was unresponsive. He was pronounced dead shortly after. He was twenty six years old. He was three weeks from being considered for release.

This episode tells the full story of David Dungay Jr, a proud Dunghutti man from Kempsey who deserved better from every system that was supposed to keep him safe. We talk about who he was before the circumstances of his death swallowed that. We talk about the Immediate Action Team officers who held him down, most of whom had received no training in the risks of restraining someone face down for an extended period, a risk that had been documented in the medical literature for years and flagged specifically in Royal Commission recommendations made twenty four years earlier.

We talk about the coronial inquest that took four years to deliver findings of systemic failure, and then recommended no disciplinary action against any officer involved. We talk about his mother Leetona Dungay, who has stood in front of crowds of tens of thousands, taken her son's case to the United Nations, and refused to let the word systemic be the last word on what happened to her son.

And we talk about what it means that this country had already been told, in writing, exactly how to prevent this, and still let it happen.

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.

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.