On 10 June 1838, a group of armed men rode onto a station in northern New South Wales and killed at least twenty eight Wirrayaraay people, men, women, and children, then burned the bodies two days later to destroy the evidence. What happened next set this massacre apart from hundreds of others across colonial Australia: a station manager reported it, a Governor ordered an investigation, and seven men were eventually hanged for it, the only time in this country's colonial history that white men were executed for killing Aboriginal people.

This episode walks through how the Myall Creek massacre unfolded, why the first trial ended in a not guilty verdict in fifteen minutes, and how one Attorney General's decision to pursue a second trial changed the outcome. We also look at what happened to the men involved afterward, including the leader who was never caught, and how this single, partial moment of accountability did nothing to stop the broader pattern of frontier violence across the continent, a pattern researchers are still mapping today.

Content warning: this episode includes detailed historical accounts of a massacre, including the deaths of children, and of the trial and executions that followed. If anything raises something for you, 13YARN (13 92 76) is a 24/7 crisis line staffed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

In August 1928, a dingo trapper named Fred Brooks was killed near a waterhole called Yurrkuru in the Tanami Desert, after breaking Warlpiri marriage law. What followed was ten weeks of killing carried out by a police constable and his posse, sweeping across Warlpiri, Anmatyerre, and Kaytetye Country with no real attempt to distinguish the people involved in Brooks's death from anyone who simply happened to be nearby. To this day, nobody agrees on how many people died, with estimates ranging from the official count of thirty one to oral histories putting the number closer to two hundred.

This episode covers the Coniston Massacre, often called the last known officially sanctioned massacre of Aboriginal people in Australian history. We trace how a single phone call gave one constable a free hand to punish an entire community, how a government inquiry concluded the killings were self defence, and why this event, well within living memory, is only now starting to find a place in how Australia remembers its frontier history, including an upcoming Frontier Wars gallery at the Australian War Memorial.

Content warning: this episode includes detailed historical accounts of mass killing, including the deaths of women and children. If anything raises something for you, 13YARN (13 92 76) is a 24/7 crisis line staffed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

On 1 May 1946, around 800 Aboriginal workers walked off more than twenty stations across the Pilbara, using calendars made from jam tin labels to coordinate a strike across thousands of kilometres with no phones and no radios. It became the longest strike in Australian history, running for three years against arrests, chains, and starvation tactics, two decades before the more widely known Wave Hill walk off.

This episode looks at Stolen Wages, the government run practice of withholding and mismanaging Aboriginal workers' pay across WA and the rest of the country for most of the twentieth century. We trace how protection laws handed control of Aboriginal wages to protectors and station managers, why a 2006 Senate inquiry concluded the scale of it could never be properly counted, and how the fight for that money is still playing out today, in Queensland's settled class action, NSW's repayment scheme, WA's ongoing court case, and a new claim against the Commonwealth covering the Northern Territory.

Content warning: this episode discusses systemic financial exploitation and forced, underpaid labour. If anything raises something for you, 13YARN (13 92 76) is a 24/7 crisis line staffed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.