Qualla: Richmond River Massacres

Richmond River Massacres: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Before any of this, the river had a different rhythm. Each winter the Bundjalung moved down from the ranges to the coast as the mullet ran thick in the estuary, and people from inland came carrying black bean seeds to trade for fish. They had lived this way along the Richmond River for thousands of years. Then, in the early 1840s, men arrived chasing red cedar, the timber they called red gold, and behind the cedar came sheep, squatters, and guns. What followed on this river was not a war between equals. It was a series of killings, most of them never properly recorded, in which Bundjalung families were shot in their sleep and poisoned at their campfires. These pages hold their story, as much of it as survives.

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Richmond River Massacres: The People of the River

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The country around the Richmond River mouth belonged to clans of the Bundjalung Nation, among them the Nyangbal of the East Ballina and South Ballina districts. They were not a vague presence on the land but communities with named camps, ceremonial grounds, and a calendar tuned t...

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Richmond River Massacres: Pelican Creek and the Logic of Reprisal

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1842, five colonists were killed at Pelican Creek, about ten kilometres north of Coraki, where squatters and sawyers had built a storehouse to hold cedar and supplies. The killing was real, and a boy survived to tell of it. But what it triggered reveals the brutal arithmetic o...

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Richmond River Massacres: The Killing at Evans Head

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What came to be called the Evans Head massacre, also known as the Goanna Headland massacre, took place in 1842. European settlers, squatters, sawyers, and Border Police rode to a Nyangbal camp at Goanna Headland near Evans Head and opened fire. The most commonly cited figure is a...

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Richmond River Massacres: Poison in the Flour

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Not all the killing came by gun. In the early 1860s, the Nyangbal clan at South Ballina was given flour to make damper, and the flour was laced with poison. The plan relied on trust, on the ordinary act of accepting food. Some of the older people and the children refused the damp...

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Richmond River Massacres: Disputed Numbers, Undisputed Loss

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Richmond River killings sit within the wider Australian frontier wars, alongside places like Myall Creek, where in 1838 some of the perpetrators were, exceptionally, hanged. Here, no one was punished. The death tolls remain contested to this day, recorded late, passed down th...

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