Massacre of the Kurnai

In 1838, the hanging of seven white men for killing Aborigines led to a series of massacres that destroyed the Kurnai people.

The conviction of seven Victorian settlers for the murder of Aboriginal people at Myall Creek in New South Wales was the first time that Europeans had been sentenced to death for killing ‘blacks'.

This sentence posed a big problem for settlers who, until then, believed that they could use any means to take and secure land for themselves. From this point on they could no longer openly kill Aborigines in the pursuit and ownership of land. This not only fed the European settlers' growing resentment and paranoia, it also encouraged settlers to band together to cover up any killings of Aborigines.

In Gippsland in 1840, a Scot named Angus McMillan decided to take revenge on the local Kurnai who had herded the settlers' cattle into the bush. McMillan formed a posse and spent the next few days hunting and killing local Aboriginal people. He kept no record of the numbers, although the Kurnai deaths were later estimated to be between 50 and 60. Several white settlers were also killed in the fighting.

Over the next few years tension between the local Indigenous people and the settlers continued. In July 1843, members of the Kurnai tribe killed Donald Macalister – a friend of McMillan's – after Macalister tossed hot ashes at the feet of a Kurnai warrior as a ‘joke'.

In the weeks that followed, Angus McMillan and others ambushed as many Kurnai camps as they could find, killing every man, woman and child.

Word of the killings reached Sydney prompting Governor Gipps to intervene by removing from the area a squatter who had been a notorious killer of Aborigines in Victoria's western district.

Others also considered the actions of McMillan and his companions as barbaric:

It is absurd to blame the Aborigines for killing sheep and cattle. You might as well say it is immoral for cats to catch mice. Hunting was their living, the land and every animal thereon was theirs... to seize their lands by force and to kill them was robbery and murder.

– George Dunderdale, Book of the Bush 1898

Despite attempts by the authorities to control the situation, the killings continued. In less than 15 years, the Kurnai population had decreased from 2000 to 126.