The memorial opened in 2000 but efforts to establish something in New England to commemorate the massacre had been talked about for years. Bingara Apex Club proposed a memorial in 1965 to remind people “of their lack of feeling for the Australian aborigine”. A story, in the Inverell Times, elicited a response in the Bingara Advocate some days later. “The whole idea is ill-conceived, unconsidered and mischievous and an insult to the Bingara people,” fulminated T.J. Wearne, of local property ‘Beaufort’.
Len Payne, an Apex member, had moved to Bingara in 1937 and worked as the projectionist at the Roxy cinema in the town. He would often speak about 10 June 1838 with his good friends Cecil and Bill Wall, the grandsons of a station hand at Myall Creek. Every year from 1988, Payne took a wreath up to the property. Shortly before his death in 1994 he told Pat Collins, a retired psychologist researching Queensland massacres: “there [have] been at least three different attempts to grow a tree there. It was intended to be a Kurrajong tree because they are markedly a widely respected tree, and able to be discerned quite clearly.”
Collins interviewed Payne while researching ‘Goodbye Bussamarai: the Mandandanji Land War, Southern Queensland, 1842-1852’. Collins’ recording commences with Payne talking about Roger Milliss. Payne disagreed with aspects of the historian’s account of the Myall Creek Massacre in ‘Waterloo Creek’ but – as in the book Milliss writes – conveyed in words to Collins how, while Major Nunn had been prosecuting massacres in New England at the end of 1837 and the beginning of 1838, a new governor with different policies with regard to Aboriginal people had arrived in Sydney.
The massacre never had to happen but in an age when news was spread on horseback or by sailing ship, communications didn’t work too well. Not well enough to save 30 lives, at least.
In the year Milliss’ book was published Uniting Church Reverend John Brown began to further reconciliation. He told me in an interview:
From 1992 onwards I worked full-time on behalf of the Uniting Church at promoting reconciliation between non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal people across Australia. As such, I travelled all around the country visiting Uniting churches and other organisations and trying to build relations between them and local groups of Aboriginal people right across the country.
I sensed that – in travelling round the country – there were many places of painful memory for Aboriginal people, particularly massacre sites. And in talking with Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people I said, “I think that we need at some point to go back to some of the painful places in our shared history.” It was Sue Blacklock from Tingha who took me up on this and said, “Well, why don’t you come to Myall Creek.” Sue is a descendant of those who were massacred at Myall Creek, a descendant of one of the persons who escaped.
A cousin of Lyall Munro Snr, a Kamilaroi elder and former executive member of the now-defunct National Aboriginal Conference of Australia, Uniting Church member Sue Blacklock invited Brown to Myall Creek, and an advertised conference was held over a weekend in October 1998. Brown again:
She was part of the Church and she was part of a group to whom I was speaking about the need to visit these places of painful memory. Because Myall Creek was of such pain to her and Lyall and the other descendants, she advised us to come there to hold a conference.
We planned a conference in October 1998 for people from across NSW, from the Uniting Church basically. I advertised it locally in the Inverell paper, over the radio, and so on. And so a number of local people who’d also had an interest in commemorating this history came together with us. They included Ted Stubbins and a woman who is no longer there but played a key role in all of this was Paulette Smith.
We used her house for some meetings. And she had already collected many press clippings from the earlier decades about Len Payne’s work and so on. We met in 1998 in October and spent a weekend in which we recalled the history, including the history of the massacre at Myall Creek. We heard from local people, Lyall attended – they weren’t all Uniting Church people of course. There were other church people and there were non-Church people who came because they were interested in what we were doing. At the end of that conference we resolved that we should erect a memorial. We have brought stones from our own places all round NSW and further afield symbolising the fact that these massacres occurred all over the country.
Peter Stewart, who wrote a novel fictionalising the events of 1838, said in an interview that had become interested in Myall Creek as a first-year-out history teacher teaching history and English. It was 1978.
I was just doing some research in the library and came across this book called ‘Early Colonial Scandals’. There was a chapter in that of about 10 or 12 pages long on the Myall Creek massacre which I found absolutely fascinating. I started researching is shortly after that.
Stewart first heard about efforts to establish a memorial in 1999.
I went up and attended a couple of meetings there with the people like John Brown and Lyall Munro etcetera. Just discussed the planning for it, what the memorial should look like, what form it should take, where exactly it should be. Then we discussed things like the wording for the plaque and then the wording for the plaques leading up to the main memorial and all that sort of stuff.
The wording for the plaque was decided by the group. Stewart again:
We all contributed. The meetings at that stage probably involved probably about 30 or 40 people. There were quite a few Aboriginal elders and that in those early meetings, as well as quite a few non-Indigenous people, some associated with both the Uniting Church and the Catholic Church. The wording on the main plaque was something that everyone contributed to. There were several of us that did contribute specifically to the plaques on the walkway because that required more specific knowledge of the actual history. Because the history’s outlined on the plaques on the walkway.
When we were planning it and trying to decide what it should look like and all that sort of thing, the consensus very quickly became that it should be a stone, a large stone, a large rock. They were saying, ‘Well, OK, what sort of rock. How big should the rock be?’ And I’ll never forget, Lyall said ‘It should be as big as the memorial hall. You know, something that really stands out.’ Of course we were sitting at the memorial hall. Well, you can imagine trying to get a rock the size of the memorial hall.
Lyall wanted a rock as big as that, the size of that. So everyone [said], ‘Yes, it’s a lovely idea, Lyall, but not that practical’. A little bit hard to find a rock that was that big, and that wasn’t Uluru, and fit it on the back of a truck to get it transported there. They managed to find [a] rock, and that was transported, as you probably know, [by] one of the major transport companies.
Transfield donated the services of a crane and truck to move a large rock from the forest near the Copeton Dam outside Inverell into position near Myall Creek. Money arrived from the Uniting Church NSW, the NSW Government, and the Commonwealth.
Stewart remembered how Monroe had gone to the owner of the Myall Creek Station in an effort to get the stone placed on their land.
I forget his name but he’s a retired corporate exec, now I forget which company it is that he was involved in. He was CEO for some major corporation. And Lyall and I forget who else, went to dinner with him, and that would have been in 99. But once again it wasn’t about locating the actual memorial on his property.
Lyall [had] a vision to one day be able to buy that station back. But because the massacre didn’t happen on the actual station, the massacre – on his station, it was Dangar’s station in 1838 when it happened. But nowadays it’s part of that stock route where the massacre happened, which is where the memorial is and the actual massacre site’s just off in one of the gullies about 150 metres from where the actual stone is now.
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| Participants in a memorial ceremony gathered in the winter of 2008, as they do every year, at the rock. |
The memorial rock was oriented so that it would face east, for a couple of reasons. One was out of respect for the site itself. “They didn’t want people tramping over the massacre site,” Stewart said. “And also that it was more accessible, where it’s been located there.” It was a practical concession?
Practical but also principally out of respect for the site itself. They didn’t want people tramping all over the exact site. And there is some debate about which of the several gullies is the massacre site.
A debate that goes back as far as Payne’s disagreement with Milliss’ book. The shadow of Myall Creek lays upon us all. Perhaps we’ll escape from the debate one day, but not yet.
