Avenue Range Station massacre

The Avenue Range Station massacre was the murder of a group of Aboriginal Australians by white settlers during the Australian frontier wars. It occurred in about September 1848 at Avenue Range, a sheep station in the southeast of the Colony of South Australia. A contemporary account of the massacre listed nine victims – three women, two teenage girls, three infants, and an old man blind and infirm. Another account published by Christina Smith in 1880 gave the number of victims as eleven, and specified that they belonged to the Tanganekald people.

About Avenue Range Station massacre in brief

The Avenue Range Station massacre was the murder of a group of Aboriginal Australians by white settlers during the Australian frontier wars. It occurred in about September 1848 at Avenue Range, a sheep station in the southeast of the Colony of South Australia. A contemporary account of the massacre listed nine victims – three women, two teenage girls, three infants, and an old man blind and infirm. Another account published by Christina Smith in 1880 gave the number of victims as eleven, and specified that they belonged to the Tanganekald people. Pastoralist James Brown and his overseer, a man named Eastwood, were suspected of committing the murders in retaliation for attacks on Brown’s sheep. The details of the case were known for decades after the murders, but distortions of the murders eventually appeared in print and were embellished by local white and Aboriginal historians. This undeclared and covert fighting between settlers and Aboriginal people in South Australia is considered part of the Australian Frontier wars. In common with other areas of Australia, settlers on the frontier in southeast South Australia employed various tactics to deal with Aboriginal resistance. Initially, settlers attempted to keep them at a distance using threats of violence, but they soon escalated to using actual violence, hoping that by terrorising them they could prevent them from 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 March 1847 for a murder of an Aboriginal man in the colony’s southeast – the only such sentence carried out in the history of South Australian’s early white settlement.

The date of the original massacre is unclear, but an attempt to destroy the evidence is later exhumed and burnt in a fire which contained more bones than had been buried in an original fire. The evidence of the murder is unclear. The original date of the massacre is unknown, but an attempt to destroyed the evidence in an first attempt todestroy the evidence, but later burnt in an fire contained more remains than had originally been buried. The case did not go to trial, although the magistrate who committed him for trial told a friend that there was ‘little question of the butchery or the butcher’. Some key witnesses, including Eastwood,. either fled the colony or refused to cooperate with the investigation. There were also significant restrictions on the use of evidence given by Aboriginal witnesses, especially where a verdict could involve capital punishment. The Protector of Aborigines, Matthew Moorhouse’s role was to safeguard the rights and interests of Aboriginal people within the colony. He began his inquiries assisted by a mounted policeman, an interpreter and an Aboriginal guide. An Aboriginal witness, Leandermin, took Moorhouse to the site of the alleged crime. He told Moorhouse that, on the day the killings occurred, he and a white man named Parker were walking along a road when they heard shots. He went to see what was happening and, from behind some trees, saw four Aboriginal women, with fresh wounds. Two white men were presumed dead because they were not moving or lying on the ground.

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