Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek i In Search of History: the Massacre at Murdering Creek © Ray Gibbons (2015) Abstract: Australia is populated with violent place names, a shadowland of myth. This is the story of toponymic Murdering Creek, on the southern side of Lake Weyba near Noosa in Queensland’s southeast. We will assess the alleged massacre at Murdering Creek as a potential type instance of the Australian genocidal process, while the war for land raged across the continent for a century or more. Aboriginals were an impediment to a blitzkrieg of settler occupation. Aboriginal dispersal was abetted by a Government process that included military (at first) and then police enforcement. Heavily armed pastoralists were encouraged to take the law into their own hands, if they did it circumspectly, under the guise of self-protection. Aboriginals resisted, but the war was too one-sided. The reward for resistance was to be shot or hanged. British law did not allow Aboriginals to own land, not until well into the 20 th century. Until then, Aboriginal dispossession was legal, leaving the First People as trespassers. With no where else to go they became refugees. Detention centres became the Government answer to the Aboriginal problem. And a ruthless boot on the neck. Over 90% of the Aboriginal population ‘disappeared’ by 1911. We see the pattern of invasive occupation repeat for all states, including Queensland. From the early 1860s, almost all the available pastoral areas in south east Queensland had been taken over by British settlers seeking their fortune. Many leases remained a battleground. In our forensic examination of the Murdering Creek massacre myth, we find that it is supported by an actual event that, on the balance of evidence, took place in 1864 on a 23,000 acre pastoral station called Yandina Run, between the Maroochy River and Lake Weyba. We determine that the massacre was carried out by local pastoral workers and at least one timbergetter. The motive seems to have been a belief in white supremacy, and a pathological desire to remove the Aboriginals, who objected to a homestead being built near a sacred bora in 1862. An unkown number of Aboriginals were murdered while in canoes at the mouth of the Creek and into the shallow foreshore of the lake, where they had been inveigled by a ruse. Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek ii Document Structure: For We Are Young and Free (FWAYAF) Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek provides a detailed case instance of the Occupation Process and Lemkinian genocide , as defined in the companion methodology ( Political Uses of Australian Genocide ). The methodology includes a semantic typology for mass killing and the variant terms. It helps us to confirm that the proposed theoretical model for Australian genocide is potentially falsifiable through an elaboration of the abundantly available case instances (or massacre events). This then allows us to develop a theoretically consistent contextual referent (or type instance of the model) for each Recollection in Recollections of a (Homicidal) Pastoral Frontier 1788 – 1928. Some data stores are reused many times by the central theses. They include biographical details of the central players, and an extended repository of massacres (with those involved, where and when). Rather than replicate the data stores in each thesis, they are made available in a persistent (or reference) data base. Among the data stores is a repository that holds transcripts of the key pieces of land legislation and other Government Proclamations, Enquiries and racist Acts of Parliament that were used to dispossess and subjugate Aboriginals in a sustained genocidal process, as set out in the central theses, and these documents are provided in Documents That Shaped Our Nation. Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek iii Acknowledgments This paper could not have been written without acknowledging one of the most powerful contributions in the field of Australian race relations. It is the book by Raymond Evans, Kay Saunders and Kathryn Cronin. They provide a sad commentary on the prejudice that still surrounds any investigation of societal dysfunction and Aboriginal mistreatment: We produced this book ourselves, with little institutional help. Our expressed intentions to pursue the spectre of racism were mostly greeted with academic apathy and unease – at times outright hostility.... When the book at last appeared, some of Brisbane’s leading bookstores refused to stock it and the city’s main daily newspaper neglected to review it. 1 I wish to extend my deep appreciation to Benny Alcorn, Audienne Blyth, Elaine Brown, and Ray Kerkhove, whose research and support made this document possible. Ray and Meredith Walker received a draft, before their presentations to the Australian History Association conference on the subject ‘Conflict in History’ held at Brisbane in July 2014. In particular, I am indebted to Ray Kerkhove, who discovered the hand written letter by William Low to David Bull, dated 1944, at the Royal Historical Society of Queensland archives, illuminating what until now had been an enduring and lengthy conundrum for well over a hundred years. Viz: If the Murdering Creek event in Southeast Queensland actually happened, who might have been involved as perpetrators and involved parties? And when? This will also lead us to examining the reason why, sometimes a more perplexing question, until we remember that motivation for violence at the frontier was not always so mysterious. So enjoy the jigsaw puzzle, as we carefully put the disparate pieces into place, allowing the four dimensional picture slowly to emerge. It is hoped that the case instance model for the murdering Creek event can then contribute to our understanding of the patterned violence that consumed the pastoral frontier for well over a century, part of a series that we will call For We Are Young and Free, where case instances will anchor the primary narrative for each determinable event. 2 1 Raymond Evans, Kay Saunders, Kathryn Cronin, Race Relations in Colonial Queensland (1975): xiv. 2 The back cover shows the mouth of Murdering Creek at its juncture with Lake Weyba in Southeast Queensland. The photograph was taken by the author. Ironically, the council sign is not a plaque to commemorate the historical significance of the site; rather, it is for a fish nursery. Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek iv The song is gone; the dance is secret with the dancers in the earth, the ritual useless, and the tribal story lost in an alien tale 3 3 From Bora Ring , by Judith Wright. The physicist and historian, John Steele, in his important book Aboriginal Pathways in South East Queensland and the Richmond River , was shocked and deeply moved to discover the extent of cultural destruction caused by the wholesale extermination and ethnic cleansing, when many surviving Aboriginals wistfully asked him ‘ Tell us please where we came from, and who we are. Tell us about our sacred sites, our languages, our customs, and our traditional skills .’ [p. xix] The Aboriginal rights movement, emboldened by the 1992 Mabo decision, is gradually regaining a proud cultural identity for all Aboriginal people. However, there is some way to go: many Aboriginals still live in third world conditions, the result of post-occupation policy and practice for Government at all levels, both State and Federal. And until we acknowledge our murderous past, there remains moral doubt about our future. Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek v Figure 1 Map of the present day Sunshine Coast in southeast Queensland , showing the area between Maroochydore and Maryborough, including the geography north of the Maroochy River where it flows from Yandina, and below Lake Weyba, near Noosaville, the location of Murdering Creek. The sunny Government tourist map overlays the ghosts of the past, buried in an obscured layer of history we are rapidly forgetting in the accretions of time. Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek vi Preface Myth is the handmaiden of reality, a more onerous citizenship. It can be ignored. Or cast aside as quaint folklore from another time. Or it can be explored and possibly verified or refuted. What cannot be discounted: myth forms a large part of the Australian historical landscape. For over a century, Australia was a war zone. It was a war for land and Aboriginals were in the way. A firestorm of massacres defined the pastoral frontier as it advanced across the continent. Many of these massacres have achieved the element of myth, untested, insufficiently examined, often ignored or discounted, having the elements of social folklore, perhaps fictitious or imaginary, with the imputation of a false belief. Most escape our notice because there were almost never any prosecutions, a genocidal process that saw the Aboriginal population across Australia drop by over 90% from various imposed causes within a hundred and forty years, which is the period between 1788 and 1928, the date of the last major massacre at Coniston in the Northern Territory. Myths allow us to invoke a ‘mysterious process’ for the disappearance of Aboriginal society, invoking prejudicial Darwinian thinking, that Aboriginals were unfit to survive with the arrival of a superior race. Critically flawed of course. Prejudiced, certainly. Racist, absolutely. We remind ourselves that racism is the belief that one race considers itself superior to another. Perhaps history is not so far removed after all. Such analysis as presented here can help identify and acknowledge the facts of past mistakes in a blitzktrieg of similar events to Murdering Creek that brutally overcame any resistance and swept the land clean of Aboriginals for pastoral supremacy. If we accept and admit the past, perhaps in time we can even hope to complete the unfinished business of reconciliation. The massacre at Murdering Creek was enabled by the murderous and racist policies of the newly installed Herbert Government, the first Government of Queensland. Herbert assumed the office of Government in 1859, and was sworn into power in 1860. He took the title of premier and colonial secretary, which included Aboriginal affairs. He is considered the founder of Queensland. During Herbert’s long term, there is no legislative evidence that he considered the human rights of dispossessed Aboriginals. His priorities were economic, and Aboriginals were an encumbrance. Herbert’s Government introduced Aboriginal dispersal policies that legitimised extermination. Britain was a co-conspirator. Britain supplied the weaponry, strategic governance, immigrants and maritime mercantile support. Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek vii In our findings, Murdering Creek therefore becomes a type instance of a violent State sponsored process that saw the destruction of Aboriginal society across a multiplicity of other Murdering Creek type events in Queensland and across Australia. Meticulous effort has been used to investigate this particular myth, because other researchers may be able to reuse the originating syncretic methods and investigative tools that can help them further decode Australia’s mythical past. Not the largely confected, triumphal past of heroic pastoralism, as it tamed the land for economic gain. No, it is the violent and defiantly racist past that many of us choose to forget, including that at Murdering Creek. It is the invasive pattern of armed dispossession, the process of occupation that formed the political uses of Australian genocide, where economic imperatives outweighed humanitarian considerations. We ignore the past to our cost. For many years, I only slowly realized the horrific extent of Aboriginal depopulation after the British invasive occupation. Like most Australians, I was culturally and historically blind, carried along by popular mythology, by the dominant paradigm, by the compelling narrative of heroic settler sovereignty and benign pastoralism in ‘taming the land’. Murdering Creek is one small example of my ignorance. Some political parties and prestigious universities still discourage overly critical examination of our past, believing that it may perpertuate an overtly negative view of Australia’s history. Instead, Governments may ask their constituents to dismiss historical acts of violent racism and some university history faculties ask their students to focus on bland, dispassionate studies such as ‘race relations’ or ‘Aboriginal European’ relations, rather than massacres and the egregious role of Imperial Britain. 4 The absurdist proposition is like a law court admonishing the counsel for an alleged offender: ‘P lease do not criticize the crimes of the accused. It is too negative. Please concentrate on the contributions of the accused to the betterment of society ’. It is Dadaesqe in its implications. What we are being asked to do is ignore the bloody events of our past, or not bring them to attention, because it is unhelpful to 4 The tendency of certain defined social groups to adhere to dominant paradigms was first noted by Thomas Kuhn in the Sructure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) . Normative values and patterned modes of thought are an artefact of probability density functions, where the behavioural distribution pattern can be further shaped by directed processes imposed by those with the power to influence the majority. For example, the medical fraternity proponed for a long period that stomach ulcers were caused by ‘stress’, where we now know that the significant cause is a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori . Similarly, we now know that gene expression can be influenced by the environment, through the epigenome, which has given rise to the science of neuroepigenetics, suggesting that some normative behavioural disorders can be acquired characteristics, imposed by group selection and environmental stressors. Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek viii our multicultural future and our national self-image. The general argument is that we must have a balanced view, consistent with the conceptual relativity of modern social theory. But relative to what? It is like giving equal time to the tobacco lobby, arguing the health benefits of smoking, but ignoring inconvenient evidence. If our past is not acknowledged, how can our future values be qualitatively any better or more considered? Already Australia has the reputation for the greatest number of mammalian extinctions in the world, caused by excessive land clearing, the introduction of feral animals and over-grazing. Already, we are recognised for an Aboriginal depopulation figure of well over 90% since colonisation until the time of Federation. But we are asked to ignore our scotoma, our disability, our dysfunction, assuming that we even recognise the existence of the pathology. We are asked to ignore any unblinkered ways of seeing reality. Until we recognise our past and demand accountability, we must continue with denialism, with perpetuating the ‘standards of the time’ argument, with acceding to the egregious Windschuttle argument that the absence of case law means that genocidal violence did not happen in the longest war in our history. We are asked, as part of the ‘history wars’ and the associated ‘black armband view of history’ derogated by some historians, to ignore those negative aspects of our genocidal past and focus on the heroic endeavours of nation building and the betterment of race relations. We must resist; and we must continue to question. If we do not acknowledge the past, reconciliation is fraught, our national values suspect. Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek ix Contents Document Structure: For We Are Young and Free (FWAYAF) ............................................................................ ii Acknowledgments ................................................................................................................................................. iii Preface ................................................................................................................................................................... vi INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................................. 1 Terminology ........................................................................................................................................................... 1 Methodology......................................................................................................................................................... 23 PART 1: PRELUDE (CONTEXT) ....................................................................................................................... 31 Myth and Reality in Australian Colonial History and Beyond ............................................................................. 31 The ‘Myth’ of Murdering Creek ........................................................................................................................... 56 Contextual Historical Landscape of the Sunshine Coast ...................................................................................... 65 E. G. Heap’s Contextual History of the Maroochy District. ............................................................................ 65 Sunshine Coast Contextual Landscape: 1840 - 1890 ...................................................................................... 81 The Political Uses of ‘Dispersal’ in Early Queensland (Post Separation) .......................................................... 100 Rev. Fuller’s Mission at Lake Weyba and Elsewhere ........................................................................................ 119 Tewantin Residents............................................................................................................................................. 141 Tewantin Parish Settlers – Early 1870s (Based on Post Office Directory Records in 1874) ......................... 144 Australian Census in 1871 (Overall results) .................................................................................................. 146 Results for Wide Bay/ Burnett Area (Gympie to Noosa) ............................................................................... 147 Governor Normanby’s Report ........................................................................................................................ 150 Timber getters ................................................................................................................................................ 154 Lease History of the North Maroochy Runs ....................................................................................................... 157 Leasehold Timelines for Yandina Run and Canando Run ............................................................................. 163 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek x PART 2: INTERMEZZO (ANALYSIS) ............................................................................................................ 193 The Strategy, Mechanics and Logistics of Mass Killing .................................................................................... 193 Crime Scene Investigation .................................................................................................................................. 206 Part 1..................................................................................................................................................... 206 Part II .................................................................................................................................................... 211 Part III................................................................................................................................................... 214 Murdering Creek – Fact Based Analysis ............................................................................................................ 216 Deconstructing William Low’s Recollections of Murdering Creek ..................................................... 218 Deconstructing Bull’s and Low’s narrative for the Murdering Creek event......................................... 231 PART 3: FINALE (SYNTHESIS) ...................................................................................................................... 248 Findings .............................................................................................................................................................. 248 Hypothesis One and variation ............................................................................................................... 256 Hypothesis Two .................................................................................................................................... 265 Hypothesis Three .................................................................................................................................. 268 Murdering Creek Conclusions ............................................................................................................................ 272 Murdering Creek Case Instance............................................................................................................ 273 Murdering Creek Event Flow Diagram ................................................................................................ 281 APPENDICES .................................................................................................................................................... 282 Murdering Creek Analytical Models .................................................................................................................. 282 Type Occupation Process, showing Actionable Components ........................................................................ 283 Occupation Process: Case Instance Example ................................................................................................. 284 Simplified Model of the British Occupation Process ..................................................................................... 286 Murdering Creek as an Instance of the Queensland Genocidal Process......................................................... 287 Process Flow Model (Using Murdering Creek as an example) ...................................................................... 288 Murdering Creek Contextualised Type Process Flow .................................................................................... 290 Murdering Creek Type Process Instantiation ................................................................................................. 291 Profile of Key Actors .......................................................................................................................................... 292 Browne, George (1843 – 1928) ............................................................................................................ 292 Bull, David William (1872 – 1960) ...................................................................................................... 292 Chippindall, William Tatlock (1846 – 1920)........................................................................................ 293 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek xi Darwin, Charles (1809 - 1882) ............................................................................................................. 309 Farquarshon, Farquharson, Farcuson, Farquarson? .............................................................................. 310 Goggs, Matthew (1809 - 1885)............................................................................................................. 312 Herbert, Hon. Robert (1831 – 1905) .................................................................................................... 317 Jones, Family ........................................................................................................................................ 319 Low, William Clark (1869 – 1946) ...................................................................................................... 323 Macalister, Arthur, CMG (1818 – 1883) .............................................................................................. 325 MacKenzie, Sir Robert Ramsay (1811 – 1873) .................................................................................... 326 Petrie, Thomas (1831 – 1910) .............................................................................................................. 328 Walker, Frederick (1820 - ?) ................................................................................................................ 328 Wheeler, Frederick (1830 - 1882) ........................................................................................................ 331 Scott, Walter Jervoise (1835–1890) ..................................................................................................... 333 Seymour, David (1831 - 1916) ............................................................................................................. 334 Vickery, Ebenezer (1827 – 1906) ......................................................................................................... 335 Selected Bibliography......................................................................................................................................... 338 Index ................................................................................................................................................................... 345 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek xii List of illustrations Figure 1 Map of the present day Sunshine Coast in southeast Queensland, ........................................................... v Figure 2 A native of the Kabi tribe, Maryborough, Queensland .......................................................................... 72 Figure 3 Natives of Yabber, Kabi tribe, Mary River, Queensland ....................................................................... 79 Figure 4. Chronology of Aboriginal dispossession along the Sunshine Coast .................................................... 90 Figure 5 King Tommy, King Brown and Susie .................................................................................................... 96 Figure 6 1865 Selection Map (Wide Bay and Burnett) .................................................................................... 106 Figure 7 1865 Selection Map (East and West Moreton, Western and Eastern Downs) ..................................... 106 Figure 8. Crown Lands in Queensland 1860 – 1884 ........................................................................................ 107 Figure 9 Queensland acreage sold by year, between 1860 and 1866 inclusive ................................................. 108 Figure 10 Cumulative Queensland acreage leased from 1860 to 1866 .............................................................. 108 Figure 11. Population Table, Queensland 1860 - 1884...................................................................................... 110 Figure 12 Queensland population growth 1860 - 1866....................................................................................... 110 Figure 13. Queensland land and immigration legislation 1860 - 1866 .............................................................. 113 Figure 14. Members of the Queensland Parliament 1860 - 1864 ...................................................................... 118 Figure 15 Lake Weyba mission, Land records, ................................................................................................. 128 Figure 16 Map of Lake Weyba Aboriginal Reserve ......................................................................................... 130 Figure 17 1886 Survey map from Parish of Weyba .......................................................................................... 138 Figure Figure 18 1874 Tewantin directory names ............................................................................................ 142 Figure 19 1871 census details, Tewantin area ................................................................................................... 143 Figure 20 Post Office name directory (Tewantin area)...................................................................................... 146 Figure 21. 1871 Census details (Tewantin area) ................................................................................................ 150 Figure 22. Portion 1, Parish of Noosa ................................................................................................................ 151 Figure 23. Governor Normanby’s list of Tewantin residents. ............................................................................ 152 Figure 24. Early pastoral leases 1852 - 1868 ..................................................................................................... 157 Figure 25. NSW Crown Lands Report, 1858,.................................................................................................... 158 Figure 26. List of Runs for district of Moreton, ................................................................................................ 159 Figure 27. Treasury Rental Sheet for Yandina Run ........................................................................................... 160 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek xiii Figure 28. Brisbane to Gympie Road, 1871 ...................................................................................................... 160 Figure 29. Yandina Run lessee history .............................................................................................................. 165 Figure 30. Land records, North Maroochy area ................................................................................................. 165 Figure 31. Land Portions for the Weyba and Maroochy Parishes ..................................................................... 166 Figure 32. Sketch map drawn by William Pettigrew, 1862 ............................................................................... 173 Figure 33. Transfer of Runs, 1864 ..................................................................................................................... 174 Figure 34. Yandian Run advertisement: stock for sale, 1867 ............................................................................ 175 Figure 35. Pettigrew drawing, 1862,.................................................................................................................. 176 Figure 36. Daniel Balmain's application for continuation of Yandina Run lease, 1867 .................................... 177 Figure 37. Disposition of Native Mounted Police, by area and year ................................................................. 195 Figure 38. Brisbane Courier, Monday 1st September 1862, page 2 .................................................................. 201 Figure 39. Show of force at the police barracks, Brisbane, 1868 ..................................................................... 203 Figure 40. The Murdering Creek 'commemorative plaque' ............................................................................... 207 Figure 41. Letter: Low to Bull, page 1. ............................................................................................................. 222 Figure 42. Letter: Low to Bull, page 2 .............................................................................................................. 223 Figure 43. Letter: Low to Bull, page 3 .............................................................................................................. 224 Figure 44. Letter: Low to Bull, page 4 .............................................................................................................. 225 Figure 45. Letter: Low to Bull, page 5 .............................................................................................................. 226 Figure 46. Pettigrew map, 1862 ......................................................................................................................... 229 Figure 47. Comparative fact analysis: Bull v. Low ............................................................................................ 243 Figure 48. Yandina homestead .......................................................................................................................... 245 Figure 49. George Brown's marriage certificate to Sarah Hewett (d. 1932) ...................................................... 245 Figure 50. Letter: Andison to Benfer re. Bull, page 1 ....................................................................................... 247 Figure 51. Letter: Andison to Benfer re. Bull, page 2 ....................................................................................... 247 Figure 53. Actionable component architecture .................................................................................................. 273 Figure 54. Actionable component type architecture .......................................................................................... 274 Figure 55. Actionable component type instance architecture ............................................................................ 274 Figure 56. Process Flow decomposition for Australian Lemkinian genocide ................................................... 275 Figure 135. Simplified model of the Australian occupation process, ................................................................ 286 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek xiv Figure 127. Murdering Creek massacre process flow diagram.......................................................................... 288 Figure 136. William Chippindall biographical summary .................................................................................. 294 Figure 137. Chippindall family record .............................................................................................................. 296 Figure 138. Chippindall family record .............................................................................................................. 297 Figure 139. William Chippindall selected genealogy ........................................................................................ 298 Figure 140. Albert Chippindall New South Wales BDM Registry record for birth ........................................... 299 Figure 141. Herbert Chippindall birth record .................................................................................................... 299 Figure 142. Francis Chippindall marriage certificate, ....................................................................................... 300 Figure 143. William Chippindall Mary Valley leases, up to 1880 .................................................................... 303 Figure 144. Willkam Chippindal Mary Valley leases, up to 1880..................................................................... 304 Figure 145. William Chippindall Mary Valley leases, up to 1880 .................................................................... 305 Figure 146. John Farquharson police service record ......................................................................................... 311 Figure 147. Matthew Goggs selected chronology ............................................................................................. 317 Figure 148. The Nambour Chronicle, Friday 3 May, 1946, page 4. .................................................................. 325 Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek 1 INTRODUCTION Terminology I prefer the adjectival noun ‘ Ab’original ’ to the proper name ‘ Ab’origine ’, which has accumulated inexcusable and derogatory connotations as a result of British Imperial contact history, associated with being ‘subhuman’ and ‘vermin’ and ‘dogs’ and ‘snakes’. Even gentle Darwin subscribed to this racist view of Aboriginal inferiority, 5 as we see from his writings while he was travelling with the Beagle and recording his observations in the 1830s, gathering evidence for his nascent theory of Natural Selection. This document will use the term ‘ Aboriginal ’, and ‘ Aboriginals ’ will collectively refer to the Aboriginal peoples or nations or societies across Australia. The Macquarie International English Dictionary (complete and unabridged edition) defines Aboriginal as (noun) a descendant of any of the indigenous peoples who inhabited Australia before the arrival of European settlers. I would agree except for the qualification of European . More correctly, it should read British . To say otherwise is to obfuscate. Massacre The editor’s use and definition of the term ‘ massacre ’ requires some explication in the Aboriginal context for colonial pastoral society: 6 The Macquarie Dictionary defines massacre as ‘ the killing of large numbers of people or animals’, that is, a mass killing . But it is more. When we examine the etymology of the word ‘massacre’ we find it derives from maḉacre (French), which is adapted from maslakh (Arabic), meaning: ‘slaughterhouse’ (Old Norse slatr ‘to slay’) or ‘abattoir’ (French abatre ‘to fell’). An Aboriginal massacre, as used here, is: the indiscriminate and/ or deliberate murder (whether ‘lawful’ or unlawful retribution or simply homicide) of two or more Aboriginals (whether or not they were able to adequately defend themselves) in a single incident or 5 They will not, however, cultivate the ground, or build houses and remain stationary, or even take the trouble of tending a flock of sheep when given to them. On the whole they appear to me to stand some few degrees higher in the scale of civilization than the Fuegians. Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, pp 431 – 436. 6 There is a semantic lexicon and referential typology for the term: slaughter. It includes the overlapping meanings for massacre, genocide and ethnic cleansing. See Gibbons, Ray, For We Are Young and Free Political Uses of Australian Genocide , [FWAYAF, 2014]. Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek 2 the indiscriminate and/ or deliberate murder of one or more Aboriginals (whether ‘lawful’ or unlawful retribution or simply homicide) in separate but linked incidents. For example, soldiers, police or squatters traveling around any area such as the Bathurst or New England regions in New South Wales, or the Upper Dawson or Warrego/ Maranoa in Queensland or Coniston in the Northern Territory, or Tasmania or the Kimberley in Western Australia or any other. This can be over a period of days or weeks as part of a planned and coordinated party, with the intention to exterminate some or any Aboriginal encountered (man, woman or child), using means both direct (stabbing, shooting, poisoning, clubbing, drowning, forced or coerced suicide – for example by forcing Aboriginals over a cliff) \ and indirect (starving, infecting, chaining up, incarceration, torture, sexual predation, segregation, forced removal of children, withholding reasonable standards of nutrition, housing and health care, abuse of human rights) leading to avoidable death. These methods of patterned extermination fall into the categories of Aboriginal genocide and ethnic cleansing, for which massacres are the structural bricks and mortar. Government land policy was the purposeful and greatest instrument of ethnic cleansing. The consequence of British land policy was Aboriginal extermination and displacement on a significant scale, described by one historian as a ‘melancholy footnote to Australian history’, something we are embarrassed to acknowledge, and gen