From massacre to memorial: what Myall Creek can teach the whole New England

There is a turn‑off between Bingara and Delungra that is easy to miss if you are driving with the window up and your mind on something else. It is signposted, it is public and it leads to a place most of us were never taught to picture when we think of “home”: the Myall Creek Massacre Memorial.

If you do take that turn, you will find what looks like a quiet ridge and a winter‑hard landscape. You will also find a deliberate interruption to the easy story we like to tell ourselves about this region – the story where New England was simply built by grit, good stock and a bit of luck.

A new scholarly book, Empires of Violence: Massacre in a Revolutionary Age, does not let readers stay comfortable. Written by Philip Dwyer, Barbara Alice Mann, Nigel Penn and Lyndall Ryan, this work situates Australia’s frontier violence within a global context, alongside that of Europe, North America and South Africa – in a comparative study focused on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Its core message is blunt: colonisation was never a peaceful “settlement” that occasionally went wrong. It was a project that repeatedly used extreme violence to seize land and force whole communities to accept new rules. The book argues that resistance was persistent and that massacre was one of the ways empires tried to break that resistance.

The book also offers a working definition that matters for how we talk locally. In Australia, historians have often used six or more deaths as a rough threshold for calling an event a “massacre” on the frontier. For the sake of clarity, the authors define massacre as the killing (premeditated or not) of at least six people at any one time, where the victims are generally civilians and unarmed. They note that in Australia and South Africa (and frequently in North America) raids were usually conducted at dawn when people were still asleep and that massacres were used to intimidate survivors into submission. That is not a definition designed for comfortable anniversary speeches. It is a definition designed to make us recognise a method.

Put that definition against the record we already have for our own patch and the old habit of calling frontier violence an “unfortunate chapter” starts to look like evasion.

At Myall Creek, twenty‑eight Wirrayaraay men, women and children were killed in June 1838. What makes Myall Creek unusual in Australian frontier history is not that it happened (massacres happened across the continent) but that the legal system did, in this case, act…

Twelve men were put on trial and seven were hanged later that year. That outcome was rare enough that it became a pivot point: as the book notes, after the hangings many settlers closed ranks and massacres continued in a culture of silence.

The New England North West has another name that should jolt us into honesty: Slaughterhouse Creek. It is also known as Waterloo Creek and it is telling that an image of Waterloo Creek sits on the cover of this book. In January 1838, the NSW Military Mounted Police under Major James Nunn fought with Gomeroi people in that area. Contemporary and later accounts differ sharply on the number of Aboriginal people killed – estimates range from single digits to dozens and higher figures were reported by contemporaries such as Lancelot Threlkeld (a missionary and an advocate for Aboriginal welfare). What can be said without overreach is that there was a violent clash, that Aboriginal deaths were significant, and that the event has been remembered as a massacre.

This is where the New England’s self‑image meets a hard test. The New England Times was founded on the idea that this region has been a kind of light on a hill for regional Australia, and that it deserves its voice back. That mission only works if we can handle our own facts. Pride that depends on selective memory is not pride. It is marketing.

It also matters because refusing to name what happened strips agency from the people who resisted. The book is clear that massacre sits inside a wider landscape of conflict: raids, reprisals, skirmishes, and organised terror. If we insist the frontier was just “sporadic trouble”, we quietly tell ourselves that First Nations people here did not fight for their families, their law, and their country. That is not true, and it is not respectful.

So what would it look like to treat this as part of our civic story, rather than a specialist topic for historians?

Start with visibility. If a site is publicly recognised, sign it plainly. If a site is on a register, teach the community what that means. Work with Traditional Owners and descendants first, not last, on wording, protection and access. Myall Creek is signposted and it is visited. That should not be an exception reserved for one famous massacre.

Then do the next step: education that is local. Not a generic unit on “Indigenous history” but a New England unit that names places students can drive past. A region that prides itself on straight talk should not be raising kids who can locate Kokoda but cannot locate a massacre memorial between Bingara and Delungra.

None of this is about manufactured guilt. It is about accuracy. It is about accepting that the farms, towns, highways and shires we love sit on a foundation that includes organised violence. If we want peace to be more than a slogan, we have to start by refusing the old habit of whispering.

A community does not lose anything by telling the truth about itself. It gains maturity. It gains the right to say: we know what happened here, we know what it cost and we are choosing to live differently.