Qualla: Myall Creek Massacre

Myall Creek Massacre: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

They had names the settlers gave them: Daddy, King Sandy, Joey, Martha, Charley. Some of the children spoke a little English. A few weeks before they died, a stockman named Charles Kilmeister had told them they could camp at Myall Creek Station for safety, because gangs of armed men were roaming the New England frontier killing any Aboriginal people they found. On the evening of 10 June 1838, that promise of shelter became a trap. At least twenty-eight Wirrayaraay men, women and children — members of the Kamilaroi people, camped peacefully near the station huts — were tied together with a long rope, led over a ridge, and slaughtered. What happened next made Myall Creek unlike almost any other frontier killing in Australia: the colony hanged the men who did it.

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Myall Creek Massacre: The People at the Creek

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Wirrayaraay were not strangers passing through. They had lived for months at Peter MacIntyre's nearby Keera station, and were well known to the local stockmen. They had come to Myall Creek, on Henry Dangar's run beside the Gwydir River, precisely because they trusted the men ...

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Myall Creek Massacre: The Tenth of June

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Eleven stockmen, led by a free settler named John Henry Fleming, rode in on horseback. They were former and serving convicts; ten were European, and one, John Johnstone, was a Black African. When the station hutkeeper George Anderson asked what they meant to do, John Russell answ...

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Myall Creek Massacre: A Reckoning the Colony Did Not Want

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Hobbs reported what he had found, though Kilmeister tried to talk him out of it. Word travelled by horseback to Sydney and reached Governor George Gipps, who — backed by Attorney General John Plunkett — refused to let it pass. Police Magistrate Edward Denny Day rode the frontier ...

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Myall Creek Massacre: Silence, Outrage, and One Quiet Poem

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Much of the colony was furious — not at the killers, but at the hangings. The Sydney Herald called the prosecution "judicial murder" and ran editorials that came close to advocating extermination. Fleming, the ringleader, was never caught; he lived out his days as a respected far...

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Myall Creek Massacre: What Remains, and Who Remembers

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The descendants carried the weight quietly for generations. One spoke of driving past the place as a child — "it just had a feeling about it that I can't explain." In 2000, that silence was broken with intention. Lyall Munro Snr, a descendant of survivors, helped lead the creatio...

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