Forrest River massacre: Investigations and Royal Commission
royal commission in Western Australia
The Forrest River massacre, or Oombulgurri massacre, was a massacre of Indigenous Australian people by a law enforcement party in the wake of the killing of pastoralist Fred Hay, which took place in the Kimberley region of Western Australia in 1926. The massacre was investigated by the Woods Royal Commission in 1927 which subsequently determined that 11 people had been killed. Charges were brought against two officers but dismissed for lack of evidence. The Commissions findings have been disputed by journalist Rod Moran, whose analysis has received some academic support while most academic historians accept that a massacre did take place but disagree over the number of victims.
Background
In 1921 two returned servicemen, Leonard Overheu and Frederick Hay, applied for a grant under the War Service Land Settlement Scheme. Nulla Nulla station was excised from the Marndoc Aboriginal reserve with the traditional owners, the King River Aborigines, removed and forced to live on the outskirts of Wyndham. By late 1925 the Kimberleys had suffered two years of severe drought. Heavy rains in early 1926 filled the waterholes, which resulted in large groups of Aborigines entering the Marndoc reserve, killing cattle for food. Hay and Overheu had been complaining about the spearing of their cattle, claiming it was "part of a conspiracy" against Nulla Nulla by the Rev. Ernest Gribble of the nearby Forrest River Mission (later renamed Oombulgurri).
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This entry incorporates text from “Forrest River massacre: Investigations and Royal Commission” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.