Qualla: Waterloo Plains massacre

Waterloo Plains massacre: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

An old man stood in the open and kept handing up spears. Around him his people crouched in a gully, holding pieces of bark over their heads against the gunfire, and the bark did nothing. This was Waterloo Plains, in central Victoria, on a night in June 1838, and the man supplying those spears was among the first to be shot. The eyewitness who recorded the scene was the colony's own Chief Protector of Aborigines, George Augustus Robinson, and his words leave no room for comfort. Between eight and twenty-three Djadjawurrung people died here. The true number was never counted, because no one in authority ever truly tried.

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Waterloo Plains massacre: The Land and the Newcomers

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This was Djadjawurrung country, held for countless generations, when in late 1837 a sheep station called Barfold was pushed onto it. The owner, William Henry Yaldwyn, sent his overseer John Coppock to drive four thousand sheep up from the Goulburn district to a site on the Campas...

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Waterloo Plains massacre: The Night Attack

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The trigger, by the colonists' account, was the death of two of Coppock's convict workers and the loss of sheep, which the Djadjawurrung were said to have driven off and were eating. An armed, mounted party tracked them to their camp in a gully and attacked after dark, catching t...

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Waterloo Plains massacre: No One Answered for It

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Word did reach the authorities. When the Melbourne magistrate William Lonsdale learned of the killings, he passed the report to the Governor in Sydney, and Coppock and his party were summoned there to explain themselves, a rare step for violence done to Aboriginal people. It came...

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Waterloo Plains massacre: What Came After

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The violence did not stop with that single night. Conflict continued across these runs into the 1840s as more Aboriginal people were driven off their own country. In January 1840 Robinson returned and found the massacre site himself, a small hill behind an abandoned hut beyond th...

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