The Waterloo Bay massacre, also known as the Elliston massacre, took place on the cliffs of Waterloo Bay near Elliston, South Australia, in late May 1849. The most recent scholarship indicates that it is likely that it resulted in the deaths of tens or scores of Aboriginal people. The Elliston District Council received a national award for their work in memorialising the massacre. In May 2018, the District Council erected a memorial to acknowledge what occurred.
About Waterloo Bay massacre in brief
The Waterloo Bay massacre, also known as the Elliston massacre, took place on the cliffs of Waterloo Bay near Elliston, South Australia, in late May 1849. The most recent scholarship indicates that it is likely that it resulted in the deaths of tens or scores of Aboriginal people. The events leading up to the fatal clash included the killings of three European settlers by Aboriginal people, the killing of one Aboriginal person, and the death by poisoning of five others by European settlers. The Elliston District Council received a national award for their work in memorialising the massacre. In May 2018, the District Council erected a memorial to acknowledge what occurred. 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 March 1839, European settlers arrived from Adelaide 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 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. 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.
In 1842, soldiers were sent to Port Lincoln to help protect the settlers, but the remoteness from Adelaide meant that there were serious limitations on the rule of law in the region. This frontier violence has been described by the authors Foster, Hosking and Nettelbeck as an undeclared covert war between settlers, Aboriginal people and the local government. In the 1970s to build a memorial for the Aboriginal people killed in the massacre was unsuccessful, as the Council of Elliston demanded proof that the massacre occurred before permitting a cairn to be placed on the cliff. The deaths of the European settlers killed have been memorialised to some extent; in 2017 the Ellistons District Council built a memorial in honour of the victims. The region was inhabited by Aboriginal Nauo, Kokatha and Wirangu people. It is believed that up to 260 Aboriginal people were killed or died of wounds from the clash and five were captured, although accounts of the killing have circulated since at least 1880. The first incident occurred in June 1848 when a hutkeeper on the Stony Point sheep station, John Hamp, was speared and clubbed to death. The second incident occurred when at least one person was shot by an overseer of a station for stealing flour from William Mortanson. The third incident occurred in August when two adults, two boys and an infant died after eating flour stolen by an Aboriginal boy from Yeelanna’s station.
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This page is based on the article Waterloo Bay massacre published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 16, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
