| Site Name | Skull Hole, Mistake Creek, Forsyth Ranges |
| Aboriginal Place Name | |
| Language Group | Guwa |
| Present State/Territory | QLD |
| Colony/State/Territory at the time | QLD |
| Police District | Gregory |
| Latitude | -22.563 |
| Longitude | 143.03 |
| Date | Between 1 Jan 1877 and 31 Dec 1877 |
| Attack Time | Dawn |
| Victims | Aboriginal People |
| Victim Descriptions | Aboriginal |
| Victims Killed | 200 |
| Victims Killed Notes | |
| Attackers | Colonists |
| Attacker Descriptions | Native Police, Settler(s), Stockmen/Drover(s) |
| Attackers Killed | 0 |
| Attackers Killed Notes | |
| Transport | Foot, Horse |
| Motive | Reprisal |
| Weapons Used | Snider(s), Repeating Rifle(s) |
| Narrative | PFM Mackay published an account told to him by Hazelton Brock in an article published in the The Queenslander, 20 April, 1901: In 1877, George Fraser was droving 700 cattle to a new stockrun he planned to establish at Bladensburg, about 15 kilometres south of present day Winton, in Western Queensland. He led a party of about eight stockmen, including Hazelton Brock and Jack Wilkinson, a man named Bill and two 'new chums'. After one of the 'new chums' was killed by a group of Guwa warriors, Fraser buried the body and sent another stockman for help at the native police camp at Blackall. When a detachment of native police, led by sub-inspector Robert Moran arrived a week later, Fraser and his party had tracked the Guwa to a large camp site near a waterhole now known as Skull Creek and surrounded by steep cliffs at the head of Mistake Creek in the Forsyth Ranges. With the party now increased to 14 men, Fraser and Moran planned to attack the camp at dawn the following morning. The evening before the attack they tied up their horses more than a kilometre away from the campsite, climbed a hill above it and waited until dawn. With the sound of a mopoke as the signal, the 14 men surrounded the camp from above on three sides and began shooting. The Guwa scattered in all directions but most of them made for the waterhole. After many of them were shot, the native police went after the rest with their machetes and hacked many of them to death in the water. Hazelton Brock estimated that 200 Guwa were killed in the massacre. Brock 'collared' an Aboriginal boy from among the few survivors, named him Boomerang Jack and brought him up as a stockman. In 1901 he was working on Collingwood Station 50 kilometres west of Winton. In the aftermath, Brock took squatter John Arthur Macartney to the site to get some 'bones and specimens'. Brock's account of the massacre was published in The Queenslander in 1901. The Norwegian naturalist Carl Lumholtz visited the Skull Creek site in 1881 and saw 'a number of skulls'. |
| Sources | The Queenslander April 20, 1901, pp 757-758 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/21255745; Lumholtz, 1889, p 59; Bottoms, 2013, pp 172-174. (Sources PDF) |
| Corroboration Rating | ** |
