August 11.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Soon chained around the base of a big tree, the women waited, weary and knowing.
O’Leary was a killer and a liar. He and a gang of other whites, including police, murdered at least twenty Aboriginal people in the Kimberley in 1926. [It stemmed from when] former 10th Light Horseman and soldier settler Frederick William Hay attacked Lumbia with his stockwhip and revolver. Lumbia speared Hay and Hay died
While Leo Overheu, Daniel Murnane, Richard Jolly and constables James St Jack and Denis Regan all played roles in the subsequent mass executions and incineration of Aboriginal women and men, it is the man who called himself O’Leary who was absolutely central, not only to the savagery which exploded but also to the fabrications which resulted in them all escaping the consequences of their actions…
Between the waterhole of Gotegotemerrie and the treed plain at Mowerie, three women walked. Two men rode. O’Leary was at the head, Constable [James] St Jack brought up the rear...Old and blind Warrawalla Marga, with Goolay and Yowan guiding her, hard as it was in the neck chains, were herded by St Jack...Warrawalla slowed them down but, chained as the women were, O’Leary knew she was an impediment to the others trying to run. That made her useful. The women also knew this, so they helped her…
Earlier, as the sun threw early morning shadows, Goolay and Yowan had watched as their men, chained together and seated back to back, were shot in the forehead. One after another they slumped where they sat. Warrawalla Marga, unable to see, heard the cracks and yelling. Later she heard tree branches being chucked onto a bonfire and smelt bodies burning. Shudders of shock rippled along the chain which connected her to Goolay and Yowan. She felt and heard their tight-throated wails.
As they plodded along, pushed and pulled by O’Leary and St Jack, the women all knew their fate would also be a bullet in the head...As this column – the armed and powerful on horseback and the piteous on foot – wound its way north-west, depressions of foot and hoof were left in the sand. Horses and humans all beat down the lightest of of native grasses. As they breasted the ridge at Mowerie, the light was bright.
Soon chained around the base of a big tree, the women waited, weary and knowing. If they spoke it was in their own language. If they wept it was not just for their own fate.
Later, scattered and dry fallen timber was collected and slung around the bodies as they sagged forward, bleeding from head wounds...the fire burning overnight...In the morning O’Leary and St Jack saddled up and left camp. The tree stump was still smoking.
In the months that followed, three distinct heaps of bone and thirty-two teeth were dug from around the base of that tree stump. Only handspans away from the charred remains, O’Leary and St Jack had lunched and boiled a billy, folding their daily activities into their butchery...At the 1927 royal commission O’Leary swore he knew ‘nothing’, denying ‘every’ allegation.
Acknowledgment: Kate Auty, O’Leary Of The Underworld – The Untold Story of the Forrest River Massacre, La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc, Collingwood, 2023, p. 7, 8, 12-15.