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.

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.

The Queensland government's own official records from the early years of the Barambah settlement did not refer to the people living there as residents or community members. They called them inmates. In one report, the Chief Protector of Aboriginals noted that the behaviour of the inmates had been excellent, and that no trouble had been experienced in managing them, although they included several ex-prisoners and incorrigible girls.

Inmates. Incorrigible girls. In a settlement that would grow to house more than nine hundred people from twenty eight different language groups, most of them forcibly removed from their own Country under Queensland law.

This episode tells the story of Cherbourg, the Queensland settlement established in 1901 on Wakka Wakka Country near Murgon, originally known as Barambah. It is the story of the same Queensland legislation that produced Palm Island, applied in the south east of the state rather than the north. The same Aboriginals Protection Act. The same government superintendent controlling who could leave, who could marry, whose mail could be read, whose wages went into a government trust account instead of their hands. The same dormitory system that separated children from parents across multiple generations.

We talk about what it actually meant to be forcibly relocated to a place you had never been, from Country your family had managed for tens of thousands of years, alongside twenty seven other language groups who had also never asked to be there. We talk about the brass band, the boxing club, the football team, the quiet acts of resistance that kept Cherbourg's community alive inside a system designed to contain it. And we talk about what the trauma carried out of those eighty five years looks like in the present day, and why the story of Cherbourg did not end in 1986 when the government finally handed the land title back.

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.

Episode 27: The Warrigal Creek Massacre

In 1846, a Gippsland squatter named Henry Meyrick wrote a letter home to his family in England. He told them that no wild beast of the forest was ever hunted down with such unsparing perseverance as the Aboriginal people of Gippsland. He said he knew of men shot and burned, of women treated in ways he could not commit to paper. He said it was in everyone's interests to say nothing, because if the truth came out, the man most responsible would be tried for his life.

That man was Angus McMillan. And the massacre he was most responsible for happened in July of 1843, at a quiet bend in a creek near what is now Sale in Victoria's east, where somewhere between sixty and two hundred Gunai Kurnai people were shot down by McMillan and the group his men called the Highland Brigade.

This episode tells the full story of the Warrigal Creek massacre, the broader series of killings McMillan led across Gippsland from 1840 onward, and the landscape that still carries his name today. We talk about the Gunai Kurnai nation, a confederacy of five clans whose country stretched across thirty five thousand square kilometres of south eastern Victoria, and what happened to that population across the years McMillan operated there. We talk about the colonial conditions that produced the killing, and about Henry Meyrick's letter, one of the most damning pieces of private settler testimony in Australian frontier history, written by a man who knew exactly what was happening and stayed quiet about it publicly because silence was the commercially sensible choice.

We also talk about what happened in 2020 when East Gippsland Shire voted to remove McMillan's name from the local government area. About the MacAlister River and McMillan Strait that still carry it. And about the Gunai Kurnai community that never stopped telling this story, across all the generations between 1843 and now, until the rest of the country started to listen.

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

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.

Episode 25: The Convincing Ground Massacre

Sometime in 1833 or 1834, a dead whale washed up on a beach near the whaling settlement at Portland Bay on the south west coast of what is now Victoria. The Kilcarer Gundidj clan of the Gunditjmara nation found it first. Under Gunditjmara law, a beached whale was Country's gift, something to be shared and processed according to established custom.

The whalers wanted it too. An argument started. The whalers went back to their station and came back with firearms.

When it was over, somewhere between sixty and two hundred Kilcarer Gundidj people were dead. Two people survived. The place became known as the Convincing Ground, because the whalers, in their own words, had convinced the Gunditjmara they would come back if they had to.

This episode tells the story of the Convincing Ground massacre, probably the first documented massacre in Victoria's colonial history, and the people it happened to. We talk about the Gunditjmara nation and what they actually built on this coastline, an ancient, sophisticated aquaculture system of stone channels, weirs, and eel traps that is now listed on the UNESCO World Heritage register alongside the Pyramids of Giza. This was not a scattered, nomadic people. This was a civilisation.

We talk about the two survivors, Pollikeunnuc and Yarereryarerer, and the neighbouring clan who took them in. We talk about George Robinson, who recorded the story eight years after the fact from the memory of thirty surviving Gunditjmara people. We talk about the historians who spent decades arguing over whether it really happened, and the Gunditjmara oral tradition that never once wavered in its account.

And we talk about the 2005 planning decision that tried to build holiday homes on top of the site.

The name Convincing Ground is the whalers' name. It encodes their version of what happened on that beach. The Gunditjmara have always had a different version.

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.