Waterloo Bay massacre facts for kids
Quick facts for kids Waterloo Bay massacre |
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| Part of Australian frontier wars | |
The cliffs of Waterloo Bay
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| Location | Elliston, South Australia |
| Coordinates | 33°39′S 134°53′E / 33.65°S 134.88°E |
| Date | May 1849 |
| Target | Aboriginal Australians |
| Deaths | See Authenticity and interpretations section |
| Assailants | European settlers |
The Waterloo Bay massacre, also known as the Elliston massacre, was a clash between European settlers and Aboriginal Australians that took place on the cliffs of Waterloo Bay near Elliston, South Australia, in late May 1849. Part of the Australian frontier wars, the most recent scholarship indicates that it is likely that it resulted in the deaths of tens or scores of Aboriginal people. The limited archival records indicate that three Aboriginal people were killed or died of wounds from the clash and five were captured, although accounts of the killing of up to 260 Aboriginal people at the cliffs have circulated since at least 1880.
Aboriginal people from the west coast of South Australia have oral history traditions that a large-scale massacre occurred. In the 1920s and 1930s, several historians examined the archival record and concluded that there is no formal or direct evidence of a massacre on a large scale, and opined that the recorded events were exaggerated by storytellers over time. More recently, another historian concluded that the rumours relating to a massacre are founded in fact, and that some form of punitive action did take place on the cliffs of Waterloo Bay, but that it had been embellished into a myth.
An attempt in the 1970s to build a memorial for the Aboriginal people killed in the massacre was unsuccessful, as the District Council of Elliston demanded proof that the massacre occurred before permitting a cairn to be placed on the cliffs. The deaths of the European settlers killed in the lead-up to the clash have been memorialised to some extent; in 2017 the Elliston District Council erected a memorial to acknowledge what occurred. In recent years authors have concluded that, whether or not a massacre occurred on the large scale suggested by some accounts, the clash has become something of a "narrative battleground" between the documented and imagined history of European settlement and the Aboriginal oral history of the frontier. In May 2018, the Elliston District Council received a national award for their work in memorialising the massacre.
Background
In March 1839, European settlers arrived from Adelaide, the capital of the colony of South Australia, to establish Port Lincoln on the east coast of the Eyre Peninsula. There were significant clashes between settlers and Aboriginal people in the years that followed, as settlers spread out to establish pastoral runs around the township. This fighting formed part of the Australian frontier wars. In 1842, soldiers were sent to Port Lincoln from Adelaide to help protect the settlers, but the remoteness from Adelaide, and the vaguely defined powers and limited policing resources of the Government Resident, the local representative of the colonial government, meant that there were serious limitations on the rule of law in the region. This was especially true with respect to Aboriginal people, who were supposed to be treated as British subjects in the same way as the settlers.
In common with other areas of South Australia, and Australia as a whole, settlers on the frontier employed various tactics to deal with Aboriginal resistance to being forced off their traditional lands. Initially these revolved around keeping them at a distance using threats of violence, but they soon escalated to terrorising Aboriginal people to stop them interfering with stock and other property, tactics which sometimes resulted in violent clashes. Violence by settlers towards Aboriginal people often went unreported to the authorities, and became more secretive after a settler was hanged in 1847 for murdering an Aboriginal man, the only such sentence in South Australia's pioneer history. This frontier violence has been described by the authors Foster, Hosking and Nettelbeck as an undeclared covert war between settlers and Aboriginal people.
Between June 1848 and May 1849, there were a series of incidents between settlers and resident Aboriginal people in the Elliston district, located 169 kilometres (105 mi) northwest of Port Lincoln. This region was inhabited by Aboriginal Nauo, Kokatha and Wirangu people. In the first of these incidents, John Hamp, a hutkeeper on the Stony Point sheep station, was speared and clubbed to death by Aboriginal people on 23 June 1848. The second incident occurred in August when at least one Aboriginal person was shot by the overseer of the same station for stealing a shirt.
In May 1849, five Aboriginal people – two adults, two boys and an infant – died after eating poisoned flour stolen by an Aboriginal man from William Ranson Mortlock's station near Yeelanna. The man from whom the flour was stolen was arrested and charged with murder, but sailed for the United States soon after being released by the authorities. According to the Commissioner of Police, this poisoning may have led to two Aboriginal revenge killings of settlers later that month. On 3 May, James Rigby Beevor was speared to death at his hut, and four days later Annie Easton was speared to death on an adjoining lease.
Recorded events
According to official records, on 27 May 1849, stores were taken from a hut on Thomas Cooper Horn's station and a hutkeeper and shepherd were threatened by Aboriginal people, who left with the goods they had taken. The station owner and some of his station hands pursued the group, and when they caught up with the fleeing party of Aboriginal people shots were fired and spears thrown. The Aboriginal group split in two, and Horn and his men followed one party to the Waterloo Bay cliffs, which the group tried to climb down to make their escape. Horn and his men opened fire, and two Aboriginal people were killed and one fatally wounded; several more were captured.
The Government Resident and the police inspector from Port Lincoln both wrote detailed accounts of the incident, neither mentioning the many casualties. One specified that only two Aboriginal people were killed. In September, a group of Aboriginal men were transported to Adelaide for trial. Two were convicted of Beevor's murder and were transported back to the Elliston district, where they were hanged outside his hut. Three were charged with the murder of Easton, but were acquitted due to lack of evidence. Others were charged over the confrontation at the hut on Horn's station. Shortly after this, two more Aboriginal men were arrested in Port Lincoln by the police and charged with the murder of Hamp. Found guilty and sentenced to death, they were later released when doubts were raised about the testimony of Aboriginal witnesses located by the police. In February 1852 another Aboriginal male was arrested as an accomplice in Hamp's murder, but after being transported to Adelaide, he too was released for lack of evidence. He tried to walk home to his country, and was murdered by four Aboriginal men for trespassing.
Memorialisation
In 1970, the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders and the South Australian Aborigines Progress Association (SAAPA) unveiled a plan to build a cairn on the cliffs at Waterloo Bay to "commemorate a massacre of 250 Aboriginal people by white settlers in 1846". It was intended that the cairn would be part of a national mourning campaign by Aboriginal people, timed to coincide with the bicentenary of the landing of Captain James Cook at Botany Bay in New South Wales in 1770. John Moriarty, the deputy president of SAAPA, said that "the Elliston massacre was part of the history of the West Coast Aboriginal population, despite strenuous efforts by the relatives of the whites involved to discredit what is a well-known fact".
The chairman of the District Council of Elliston, J. B. Cameron, said that the council would agree to the cairn being built if it could be proved that the massacre took place. He also said that a memorial to Aboriginal people who lost their lives in the early development of the area might be built. Foster, Hosking and Nettelbeck note that this offer was presumably on the condition that there would not be any reference to the alleged massacre at Waterloo Bay. This story, published in The Advertiser, resulted in a series of letters to the newspaper, from people with a range of differing viewpoints about the massacre story. These included assertions of the existence of an oral history among Aboriginal people of the west coast that a massacre did occur.
In December 1971, a small granite memorial to Hamp was erected at the site of his hut, and in the early 1970s the locations of events leading up the alleged massacre were marked by P. J. Baillie. These included the sites of the Beevor and Easton huts.
In May 2017 a memorial to the events at Waterloo Bay had been unveiled by the local council at Elliston, and after some discussion in the district over whether what happened there should be referred to as a massacre or an incident, the council agreed on including the word "massacre" on the plaque. The opening ceremony included dancing by Aboriginal dance troupe Dusty Feet Mob from Port Augusta, and was attended by Labor Senator Pat Dodson. The moment was celebrated as an act of reconciliation and healing. Aboriginal people had avoided Elliston as a taboo area ever since the massacre, but would henceforth be able to visit and pass through it.
The Elliston council's work to acknowledge the massacre through the memorial was recognised in the 2018 National Local Government Awards in the "Promoting Indigenous Recognition" category. The mayor who presided over the sometimes rancorous process through which the memorial was established, Kym Callaghan, later said that he was very proud that the massacre had been properly recognised, and observed that "it's like a big dark cloud has been lifted off the town". He ascribed his defeat in the November 2018 mayoral election to a backlash over his role with the project. When Callaghan was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in the 2021 Australia Day Honours for his service to local government and the Elliston community, he said that helping establish the memorial had been among his "proudest achievements".
