| Site Name | Goldfields Road - Halls Creek |
| Aboriginal Place Name | |
| Language Group | Kija |
| Present State/Territory | WA |
| Colony/State/Territory at the time | WA |
| Police District | Halls Creek - East Kimberley |
| Latitude | -17.442 |
| Longitude | 128.122 |
| Date | Between 1 Jul 1888 and 30 Sep 1888 |
| Attack Time | Day |
| Victims | Aboriginal People |
| Victim Descriptions | |
| Victims Killed | 35 |
| Victims Killed Notes | 35-150 |
| Attackers | Colonists |
| Attacker Descriptions | Settler(s), Stockmen/Drover(s), Police, Pastoralist(s) |
| Attackers Killed | 1 |
| Attackers Killed Notes | George Barnett |
| Transport | Horse |
| Motive | |
| Weapons Used | Revolver(s), Winchester(s) |
| Narrative | In July 1888 George Barnett was speared and killed by Jaru/Kija people while travelling between Fletcher Creek and Halls Creek. In reprisal, a punitive expedition was launched which resulted in ‘a massacre that is regarded as one of the most sweeping in local history’ (Durack, 1936, pp 35-36). The massacre was widely publicised throughout the district with the editor of Northern Territory Times (voicing public opinion) writing that the police should disregard any laws, and ‘simply admonish them and disperse them in the Queensland fashion’ implying to shoot them all (Northern Territory Times, August 18, 1888 p 3). The Eastern Districts Chronicle posited that the punitive expedition: ‘travelled over 700 miles [1127 kilometres]. The party found and dispersed over 600 adult male natives and a number of females and children’ (Eastern Districts Chronicle, October 13, 1888, p 2). The 1929 memoirs of August Lucanus, a special constable (and former German soldier and former South Australian Mounted Constable) in the punitive expedition, stated only that ‘there must have been at least 200 blacks, and they had not even tried to obliterate their tracks, we soon overtook them and they put up a fight, the women howling and sooling the men on to us. We dispersed them at last, and returned to Wyndham’ (Clement & Bridge 1991, p 46). Mary Durack added that ‘Barnett’s brother cut a triangular notch in the stock of his rifle for every native he shot with it...and the notches numbered thirty-five!’ (Durack, 1936, p 35). Colonel Angelo, the government resident of Roebourne at the time, later wrote of this incident: ‘accounts differ as to what actually happened but it is almost certain that from sixty to seventy natives there and then paid the extreme penalty. When I visited the scene a couple of years ago human bones were still to be found although over fifty years had elapsed since the massacre...The terrible vengeance meted out by the enraged diggers on that occasion has indeed proved a salutary lesson to the East Kimberley Blacks' (Angelo, 1948, p 38 cited in Owen, 2016, pp 231-233). |
| Sources | NTTG, August 18, 1888 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article3313470; Eastern Districts Chronicle, October 13, 1888, p 2 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/148605424/18172060; Daily News September 5, 1929, p 6https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/79213432/7807983; Durack, 1936, pp 35-36; Angelo, 1948; Clement, 1989, p 8; Clement and Bridge, 1991, p 46; Owen and Choo, 2003, pp 135-142; Owen, 2016, pp 231-233. (Sources PDF) |
| Corroboration Rating | *** |
