Connecting Myall Creek and the Wonomo

The Myall Creek massacre of 28 Wirrayaraay people on 10 June 1838 was one of the key events in the ongoing frontier war between settlers or intruders and the various Aboriginal peoples of Australia. It was an act of brutal murder, for which 11 non-Aboriginal perpetrators were tried and seven were hanged. As Lyndall Ryan points out in chapter 5, there had been a number of mass killings of Gamilaraay3 and Wirrayaraay people in the region over the previous year, in which many hundreds of lives were lost. The Myall Creek massacre and subsequent trial had a direct impact on policing in the colony, and affected the lives of people from different Aboriginal nations across eastern Australia. Its aftermath in the region then known as Northern New South Wales (NSW), where a Native Police force was formed a decade later, was extensive. Aboriginal responses to the event in both the past and the present provide new insights, including how people from different Aboriginal groups at the time may have heard about Myall Creek and other violent clashes with white settlers, and how their families remember frontier conflict today.