"too notorious to be denied": The Murdering Gully Massacre(s)

Abstract

On 1 November 1839, Charles Sievwright reported that an Aboriginal named "Tainneague" had told him up to thirty Aboriginal people had been killed in a "massacre" that involved "Hamilton, Taylor and Broomfield". Seven other Aboriginal people would provide similar accounts. Eight weeks later, Sievwright arrived at the massacre site to find Taylor had fled, and local colonists provided depositions that were "more of an exculpatory than inculpatory character". Despite Taylor being involved in numerous other violent incidents against Aboriginal people, he was seemingly lauded by colonial society rather than shunned for his crimes. He was twice appointed a Magistrate and nominated into the Melbourne Club by the former Chief Commissioner of Police and President of the Legislative Council. Arriving in Australia from what appears to have been a relatively poor family, he died a "gentleman" ensconced in the wealth he amassed from pastoral pursuits.

While the Australian historical narrative now explicitly acknowledges frontier conflict, as this study only located detailed and contextualised accounts for two per cent of the massacres reputed to have occurred, it remains an under-researched component of our nation's history. Accounts of massacres are also mostly presented as contextless vignettes in which victims (and perpetrators) lack any humanising details and which, consequently, provide minimal insight into the colonial process and the lived experiences of those directly involved in them. While such an approach has been successful in demonstrating the extent of frontier conflict, it has facilitated a narrative where massacres appear as isolated events, anomalies in an otherwise peaceful colonisation. Further, as with most histories of colonising nations, colonist-authors of massacres have mostly spoken over Aboriginal people rather than carefully listening to their words. Indeed, in the instance of the Murdering Gully massacre, disregarding what the victims told about the incident has resulted in the truth of what happened essentially remaining hidden in plain sight for almost two hundred years.

As Australia heads into an age of "truth-telling" about our complicated past, what accounts will be used to tell this "truth"? Will it be those that are essentially "a story twice written on the same manuscript"?

Rather than "talking over" the victims of the massacre, which has often characterised colonist-created histories of colonising nations, this study sought to privilege the Aboriginal voice. While this was complicated by being unable to locate anyone who identified as belonging to the Jarcoort nation who were recorded as those involved in the massacre, postcolonial methods were employed, such as privileging the Aboriginal accounts of the incident and stripping the colonial ideologies embedded in colonist accounts of the victims.

Using such postcolonial methodologies provided access to the Jarcoort voice, which revealed previously unrecognised details about the massacre which enabled the creation of an in-depth and contextualised microhistory of the incident. Further, the resultant narrative expands what is known of the everyday realities of Aboriginal people and the colonists, as well as the colonisation of south-east Australia. For instance, contrasting the belief that massacres were anomalies in an otherwise peaceful colonisation, the Murdering Gully massacre was one of a series of escalating incidents between the Jarcoort and the colonists. Consequently, this thesis argues that taking a postcolonial microhistorical approach enables the development of an in-depth contextualised account of the Murdering Gully massacre, which provides significant insight into the everyday lived experiences of Aboriginal people and colonists during the colonisation of Australia. Show more