Site NameSturt Creek
Aboriginal Place NameUnclear
Language GroupNgarinman, Bilinara, Pililuna
Present State/TerritoryNT
Colony/State/Territory at the timeNT
Police DistrictTimber Creek
Latitude-18.485
Longitude129.001
DateBetween 15 Jun 1925 and 16 Jun 1925
Attack Time
VictimsAboriginal People
Victim DescriptionsAboriginal
Victims Killed26
Victims Killed Notesmen, women and children
AttackersColonists
Attacker DescriptionsPastoralist(s)
Attackers Killed0
Attackers Killed Notes
TransportHorse
MotiveReprisal
Weapons UsedFirearm(s)
NarrativeDarrell Lewis (2021, p 140) wrote: "While managing Sturt Creek station in the 1920s or 1930s some desert blacks threw spears into his [Wayson Byers'] camp. He escaped unscathed and in the morning he tracked the blacks into the desert. He caught up with them and, in his own words, ‘evened the score’. It may have been this event that caused him to ‘disappear’ into the desert… This story was confirmed and expanded during the Tanami land claim hearing in late 1990 when elderly Aboriginal men told the hearing that several of their named relations had been shot by ‘Wayzshen Pile’. An old Territory cattleman, Dick Scobie, former owner of Hidden Valley station and friend of Byers, said that Byers told him of this incident and that he had shot twenty-six blacks at Sturt Creek... Given the relative absence of hiding places on the generally flat and open desert plain, the mobility afforded by horses and the virtual certainty that Byers had modern repeating firearms, a massacre of twenty-six Aborigines would be quite possible."
SourcesLewis, D 2021, p 140. (Sources PDF)
Corroboration Rating**