April 18.

Artwork by Glenn Loughrey

The Forrest River Massacre in Western Australia “They just lined them up and shot them one by one…”

Aboriginal people reported what they knew of the 1926 killings.

At the time, Loorabane – the sister of a man called Kangooloo, who was reported to have seen what occurred – told Lily Johnson at the mission how [Bernard] O’Leary’s party captured, killed and burnt people.

The people got all those Aborigines from the Kular tribe that lived from the coast to the [Forrest River] mission… they put the men on one chain and the women with their children and their kids on another chain… they killed the men. They just lined them up and shot them one by one… the women had to watch those men being shot… their husbands and brothers and relatives… the men had to collect wood first… [and then they were] burnt there...the women were taken away to another place just a bit away… and had to stand on the river bank but it was dry that time of year and they were shot there so their bodies just fell into the river… [When she and Kangooloo ran away with their mother when the chain came off] the police shot at hem… they killed the mother and [Loorabane] got shot in the leg… they hid in the roots of the pandanus grass in the Forrest River...under water breath[ing] through the pandanus grass… the police looked for them everywhere but they just kept real still… by evening… they moved out… [and they ran until they reached the mission. [1]

Aboriginal people’s camps were awash with the story. It wasn’t a drift; it was a cataract. The story has been repeated over years. Sometimes it has been written down, as when Ron Morgan of Oombulgurri spoke to an anthropologist in 1968.

At Wimbali they captured all the Alumbalu people and chained them up. They got around ten men and women but no children as they were all at the mission. The party kept another young man separately on a chain and forced him to guide them to Mararan, here they captured Galangari people and chained them up too. The they go back to Wimbali and make camp. Next day they go to hill country near the Ernest River or Forrest River, and here they grabbed a mob of hilltop Walar, but a man and a woman escaped and ran to the Berkeley River northwards.

Next morning the party drove all their prisoners to Gudgudmidi water hole, in the hilly country on the right bank of the Forrest River near Ernest River. To stage the mass execution of the captured men, there was a depression in the rocky surface, the natives had to sit down, chained to a tree on each side, in a circle. They sat round a rocky basin facing the middle, chained by the neck. When this was ready some black trackers and white men went around and shot one after another in the forehead with a revolver…

After this execution, they drove the women in a chain gang about three miles upstream to Balara water hole. Here some was from the water on sandy ground they hot them in the same way. [2]

In 1989, over a year into the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, Charles Overheu, the brother of Leo Overheu, [3] gave a defiant interview to historian Neville Green. He claimed his brother’s 1926 patrol ‘shot about three hundred natives all in one hit’. [4]

1. In Christine Halse, A Terribly Wild Man, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2002, p. 134, citing the ForrestRiver Mission employee Thomson, journal note 6 July 1926, original record found at 4/10/14 Ernest Gribble Papers, held in the Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.

2. Ron Morgan of Oombulgurri (Forrest River Mission) relayed this oral history to Karl Reim in 1968. The comments are found in the WAPRO Colonial Office and Police file 430: 5374/1926.

3. Leo Overheu was a World War I soldier settler and the owner of Nulla Nulla station – Auty pp.xiii, 1.

4. Neville Green, ‘The Marndoc Reserve Massacres of 1926’, PhD thesis, University of Western Australia, 1989, p. 410.

Kate Auty, O’Leary Of The Underworld – The Untold Story of the Forrest River Massacre, pp.31-33, 231 n.1, n.2, n.3.