Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows Fayleen Launder and her family visiting places in the Lander and Hanson River area of the Northern Territory including parts of her mother’s country, and voice-overs describe how local people were killed there in the Coniston massacre in 1928. The women identify the policeman from Barrow Creek as being responsible. Speaking in Warlpiri and English, they describe the events leading to the killings, explain the significance of ghost gums at a burial site and tell how people were killed at the soakages. The clip is subtitled and paintings are used as illustrations.

Educational value points

• This clip gives the personal knowledge and perspectives of an Indigenous family on some of the murders of Warlpiri, Anmatyerre and Kaytetye people carried out by police patrols between 16 August and 19 October 1928 in the infamous Coniston massacre. All of the patrols were led by Constable George Murray, the policeman at Barrow Creek blamed in the clip. Although 31 killings were admitted to, the actual number is estimated to be at least 100.

• Two separate events led to Murray being ordered out to the area around Coniston Station, north-west of Alice Springs, to enrol men in three successive patrols to bring in suspected Indigenous offenders. The first was that on 7 August Frederick Brooks, a white dingo trapper, had been murdered by Bullfrog Japanangka, a Warlpiri man, and the second was that Nugget Morton, a white pastoralist, had been severely beaten by about 15 Warlpiri men in late August.

• As the women describe and trace the geography of some of the murders in the massacre the viewer is left with the clear impression that the patrols had no interest in making arrests. Although Murray and other patrol members were subsequently exonerated on the grounds of self-defence, much later a patrol member not involved in the murders said that they shot the victims 'like dogs’.

• Tensions were high between pastoralists and Indigenous people before the massacre. Pastoralists were calling for action against those who speared their cattle, and Indigenous people were alarmed by reports of a massacre in the East Kimberley region. Although Japanangka’s motive was personal – he was angry that his wife (or wives) were with Brooks – the attack on Morton was sparked by fear following sightings of him carefully preparing his guns.

• Fayleen Launder, who appears in and directed My Mother’s Country, takes the viewer to the country where part of the Coniston massacre took place and uses interviews, voice-overs and paintings to describe what occurred. In the sequence of the ghost gums, for example, the camera pans across and up the trees as Launder quietly identifies the trees as the spirits of those buried in shallow graves by their killers.

• The rock holes and soakages referred to in the clip were highly significant places, particularly in 1928, a time of severe drought in the area. A rock hole is a deep narrow hole in a granite outcrop that acts as a natural water tank and holds water that is replenished from run-offs and soakages of water in underground decomposed rock. Rock holes were natural gathering places and it is believed that many of the people killed were taking part in ceremony.

The interviews with the women are interspersed with footage of the family walking in their country and paintings of people sitting on rocks and eating bush meat.
Woman 1 (Speaks Warlpiri) This is my country, this one. This is my country. My grandfather escaped from here. It was just before daybreak. My grandfather went to get a policeman. He got the policeman at Barrow Creek with his horses. The policeman brought them back here.
Fayleen Launder When they got shot, they were buried here. These trees are their spirits growing up. They are ghost gums.
Woman 1 (Speaks Warlpiri) That was a whitefella. He was a policeman at Barrow Creek.
Woman 2 (Speaks Warlpiri) They were sitting out there at the rockhole. They were eating bush meat — kangaroo and emu. The old people were spearing them. They were eating at the rockhole where we all went. They were sitting over there at the soakage. Those were soakages and there was another soakages over there.
Fayleen Launder All the people used to run there, hide, and that other big rockhole, all the families — mothers and children, they ran to that soakages near the rockhole, big rockhole. There’s lots of soakages that old people used to sit round and after the white fellas came shooting, they all ran to the soakages and sit around.
Woman 3 We went to the rockhole. That is where old people used to live and drink water. Valerie found a stone knife on the ground. It was the same whitefella that travelled through, killed many people along the way that he saw on his way. He killed many of them.