‘Myall Creek’ Decade Milestone
10 June 1838
28 Aboriginal children, women and old men were brutally massacred whilst the able bodied men of their families were working for the property owner, Henry Dangar, at Myall Creek Station near Bingara, north west New South Wales.
This callus, calculated and cowardly act is the only massacre of Indigenous People on this continent for which anyone has been tried and convicted. There have been numerous such massacres, larger and smaller, all part of a recipe to rid the continent of everything Indigenous, by a British Empire on which the sun never set on such barbaric brutality.
Spare a thought for their poor soles and think of the implications of their deaths, because it directly effects you.
The arrival of the first fleet wrought devastation, destruction and disease on the Australian continent, on a scale that today has global implications. The landscape was transformed by greed and today we are paying the price. The Indigenous people lived with the land, they were of the earth, not ruling it. The waters flowed, the country was for the most part wooded grassland and the grass put carbon into the ground and a layer of fresh water across the landscape with a salt layer well beneath. Australia had sufficient Indigenous grass land to reverse the effects of ‘global warming’ we are experiencing today and it was cared for and nurtured by Indigenous people who were part of the landscape.
Acknowledge the Indigenous People of this continent who were the victims of systematic genocide on the 10th of June by learning something about Indigenous grasses. Our grasses put carbon into the ground in their first season, more carbon per acre into the ground than trees. We have enough Indigenous grassland in Australia, if properly nurtured and managed, to reverse the effects of global warming for the entire planet. A fact borne out by science.
The displacement of Indigenous People on this continent by European savagery, disease, murder, slaughter of their animal resources, over grazing by introduced sheep, cattle, horses, rabbits, donkeys, goats, deer, the list goes on, let alone the introduction of foxes, foreign bird species, mice and rats. The mass extinction of flora, fauna and human species – FOR WHAT?
STOP & THINK
What if these were your family members? What if this was the land you belonged to? How would you react to your family and friends being purposely infected with smallpox only to die an excruciating death or rounded up and brutally massacred? The subjects of British genocide.
The photograph attached is of Indigenous people not much different to the people massacred at Myall Creek. Children, women and old men, Ngambri People. The people Canberra was named after – after they were displaced off their land – after every emu was shot – after the yam daisies were over grazed – after the goannas were eliminated – after the possums were blasted out of the trees – after their habitat was destroyed – after religion was forced upon them – after they were banished to an Aboriginal camp outside their land – after their children were taken. These are my family.
On the 10th of June, remember the families of the Kamilaroi people of the Myall Creek Station massacre, remember ALL the Indigenous People and Indigenous elements of this country that have been displaced and destroyed, by reinstating the Indigenous grasslands for your own sake and everyone else in the world. Since European settlement, Australia has imported around 28,000 alien plants – more than the total number of native plant species – and one in 10 of these imports has established with adverse impact.
We cannot bring back the dead or reverse the wrongs of the past, but we can restore the landscape and reverse the effects of global warming in their honor by something as simple as spreading some native wildflower seeds or sewing some Indigenous grasses.
Shane Mortimer – Ngambri Person
