Qualla: Moonah Creek Hanging Tree

Moonah Creek Hanging Tree: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. It is a beautiful tree, or was. A ghost gum, pale-barked and luminous against the red earth of far western Queensland, standing about ten metres back from the bank of Moonah Creek. To the people who pass it on the road between Urandangi and the Diamantina, it has another name, and another meaning. The Waluwarra remember it as the place where their ancestors were hanged. Around the turn of the twentieth century, oral history holds, local police used this gum as a gallows and put to death fifteen Aboriginal people, a punishment for cattle spearing carried out, in the colonists' phrase, as an example. The tree is now on the Queensland Heritage Register, listed not for its beauty but for what was done beneath it.

Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0

Moonah Creek Hanging Tree: Whose Country This Is

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. This is Waluwarra country, and has been for far longer than there have been fences across it. Their lands run through the dry, open tablelands of the far west, along the Georgina River and Pituri Creek, around Urandangi and the parish of Moonah where the tree stands. They are a p...

Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0

Moonah Creek Hanging Tree: What the Old People Say

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. The Waluwarra account, carried in the oral history of the Waluwarra Aboriginal Corporation, is specific. Two policemen stationed at Urandangi, helped by Aboriginal trackers, rounded up a group of Waluwarra people said to have speared cattle. The men were competing with Aboriginal...

Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0

Moonah Creek Hanging Tree: The Frontier in the Record

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. What the police wrote down, and what actually happened, are not the same history. No documentary evidence of the Moonah Creek hangings has ever been found, and historians note that in the long, bloody operation of Queensland's Native Police, the killings were almost always by gun...

Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0

Moonah Creek Hanging Tree: A Witness Still Standing

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. The tree itself is dying, or already dead. A report in 2003 found it reduced to about eight metres, two of its four great limbs gone, the very limb that had held the gallows beam fallen and broken on the ground, the beam itself missing, the trunk cracked and eaten through by term...

Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0