'‘Mowed them down wholesale!’
'With these words, a judge summed up the last great punitive massacre of Aboriginal people in Australia.
'Coniston, Central Australia, 1928: the murder of an itinerant prospector at this isolated station by local Warlpiri triggered a series of police-led expeditions that ranged over vast areas for two months, as the hunting parties shot down victims by the dozen.
'The official death toll, declared by the whitewash federal inquiry as being all in self-defence, was 31. The real number was certainly multiples of that.
'Coniston has never before been fully researched and recorded; with this book that absence in Australia’s history is now filled. As the last great mass killing in our country’s genocidal past but an event largely unremembered, it reminds us that, without truth, there can be no reconciliation.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'Coniston, written for a popular audience, is a compelling read. The prologue portrays Central Australia during the 1920s as an alien environment for settlers, who were at the mercy of marauding Aborigines. The racial violence, exacerbated by drought, is said to have exploded with the so-called ‘Warramulla invasion’ that saw Aboriginal people kill Fred Brooks on Coniston Station, then attack other white men camped along the Lander River. Subsequently, Mounted Constable George Murray was appointed to investigate these attacks, which led to a series of expeditions that resulted in the killing of numbers of Aboriginal people. These events are now referred to as ‘the Coniston massacre’. An official inquiry into the slayings resulted in the finding that Murray and his men shot thirty-one Aboriginal people in self-defence. Noting that the war of the Warramullas was ‘a figment of a fevered white imagination’ (4), the author, Michael Bradley, is interested in getting to the truth of the situation: ‘why it happened’ and ‘how many died’. He asks, furthermore, why Coniston ‘is not part of the conversation’ about ‘Australia's graphic history of war and large-scale death’ (5).' (Introduction)
'What could be Australia’s last and least known genocide is laid bare in Coniston, which occurred just more than 100 years ago.'
'Coniston, written for a popular audience, is a compelling read. The prologue portrays Central Australia during the 1920s as an alien environment for settlers, who were at the mercy of marauding Aborigines. The racial violence, exacerbated by drought, is said to have exploded with the so-called ‘Warramulla invasion’ that saw Aboriginal people kill Fred Brooks on Coniston Station, then attack other white men camped along the Lander River. Subsequently, Mounted Constable George Murray was appointed to investigate these attacks, which led to a series of expeditions that resulted in the killing of numbers of Aboriginal people. These events are now referred to as ‘the Coniston massacre’. An official inquiry into the slayings resulted in the finding that Murray and his men shot thirty-one Aboriginal people in self-defence. Noting that the war of the Warramullas was ‘a figment of a fevered white imagination’ (4), the author, Michael Bradley, is interested in getting to the truth of the situation: ‘why it happened’ and ‘how many died’. He asks, furthermore, why Coniston ‘is not part of the conversation’ about ‘Australia's graphic history of war and large-scale death’ (5).' (Introduction)
'What could be Australia’s last and least known genocide is laid bare in Coniston, which occurred just more than 100 years ago.'
