Qualla: Cape Grim Massacre

Cape Grim Massacre: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Long before any European stood here, the Peerapper people called this windswept corner of north-west Tasmania Kennaook, and they knew it as a place of abundance, of seals, kangaroo, and the muttonbirds that nested on the offshore islets they named the Doughboys. On 10 February 1828, that abundance became a trap. Aboriginal women had swum out to the Doughboys to gather muttonbirds, leaving their families on the beach below the cliffs. Four shepherds from the Van Diemen's Land Company lay in wait. When the shooting was over, around thirty Peerapper men, women and children were dead, and a place that had fed people for thousands of years had become a killing ground.

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Cape Grim Massacre: What Came Before the Beach

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The massacre did not erupt from nowhere. The Van Diemen's Land Company had been granted a vast tract of the Peerapper homeland, and its convict shepherds treated the original owners as obstacles. The provocations ran one direction first. In late 1827, Peerapper men were killed tr...

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Cape Grim Massacre: The Weight of the Evidence

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

We know what happened largely because George Augustus Robinson, sent by the colonial governor as a so-called conciliator, came to investigate two years later. Aboriginal women described the ambush. The four perpetrators were company shepherds Charles Chamberlain, William Gunchann...

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Cape Grim Massacre: The Hunting of a People

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Cape Grim was not an isolated horror but one episode in a methodical destruction. By McFarlane's account, the Aboriginal people of Tasmania's north-west were systematically hunted by company expeditions operating under Curr's control. Between 400 and 500 people lived in the regio...

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Cape Grim Massacre: Naming the Wound

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For more than a century the bay below the cliffs carried a name that quietly blamed the dead: Suicide Bay, as though the Peerapper had thrown themselves off rather than been shot and pushed. In 2021, that lie was undone. The bay was restored to its Aboriginal name, Taneneryouer, ...

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