The Waterloo Bay massacre, also known as the Elliston massacre, was a clash between European settlers and Aboriginal Australians that took place on the cliffs of Waterloo Bay near Elliston, South Australia, in late May 1849. Part of the Australian frontier wars, the most recent scholarship indicates that it is likely that it resulted in the deaths of tens or scores of Aboriginal people. The events leading up to the fatal clash included the killings of three European settlers by Aboriginal people, the killing of one Aboriginal person, and the death by poisoning of five others by European settlers. The limited archival records indicate that three Aboriginal people were killed or died of wounds from the clash and five were captured, although accounts of the killing of up to 260 Aboriginal people at the cliffs have circulated since at least 1880.
Aboriginal people from the west coast of South Australia have oral history traditions that a large-scale massacre occurred. In the 1920s and 1930s, several historians examined the archival record and concluded that there is no formal or direct evidence of a massacre on a large scale, and opined that the recorded events were exaggerated by storytellers over time. More recently, another historian concluded that the rumours relating to a massacre are founded in fact, and that some form of punitive action did take place on the cliffs of Waterloo Bay, but that it had been embellished into a myth.
An attempt in the 1970s to build a memorial for the Aboriginal people killed in the massacre was unsuccessful, as the District Council of Elliston demanded proof that the massacre occurred before permitting a cairn to be placed on the cliffs. The deaths of the European settlers killed in the lead-up to the clash have been memorialised to some extent; in 2017 the Elliston District Council erected a memorial to acknowledge what occurred. In recent years authors have concluded that, whether or not a massacre occurred on the large scale suggested by some accounts, the clash has become something of a "narrative battleground" between the documented and imagined history of European settlement and the Aboriginal oral history of the frontier. In May 2018, the Elliston District Council received a national award for their work in memorialising the massacre.
and 27 Related for: Waterloo Bay massacre information
The WaterlooBaymassacre, also known as the Elliston massacre, was a clash between European settlers and Aboriginal Australians that took place on the...
The Waterloo Creek massacre (also Slaughterhouse Creek massacre) refers to a series of violent clashes between mounted settlers, civilians and Indigenous...
refers to 11 people killed in this incident by two white men. 1849. WaterlooBaymassacre (Elliston on the west coast of Eyre Peninsula) – tens of Aboriginal...
The Waterloo Plains massacre occurred in June 1838 when 8 to 23 Djadjawurrung Aboriginal people were killed in a reprisal raid for the killing of two convict...
they came across. Nunn's campaign culminated in the Waterloo Creek massacre of 1838 at Waterloo Creek. Although no definitive historical records are...
stated that he thought the Aboriginal group was hostile. Witnesses to the massacre stated that between three and fifty Aboriginal men, women and children...
blacks" living on the coast at Blue Mud Bay. During the period of Watson's management, another large massacre is recorded to have happened at Mirki on...
Gippsland Gippsland (Australia) The Gippsland massacres were a series of mass murders of Gunai Kurnai people, an Aboriginal Australian people living in...
the massacre or denied it occurred at all. The site of the massacre has been identified as the present-day Taneneryouer, formerly known as Suicide Bay, facing...
the 16 March 1830 Broughton Committee, was not actually present at the massacre. The only possible Edward White, who boarded the Atlas in Cork on 29 November...
the Kilcoy massacre in 1842, a great meeting was held in the Bunya Scrub of tribes from across South East Queensland north to the Wide Bay-Burnett and...
the arrival of the First Fleet in January 1788. Pemulwuy lived near Botany Bay, which he would have known as Kamay in the Dharug language. He is considered...
The Coniston massacre, which took place in the region around the Coniston cattle station in the territory of Central Australia (now the Northern Territory)...
his land who had killed one of his shepherds. It was known as the WaterlooBayMassacre. Pinkerton arrived in Adelaide, South Australia in 1838. By 1840...
the many indigenous groups which contain an oral-history of the WaterlooBaymassacre, where up to 260 Barngarla, Nauo, Kokatha and Wirangu may have been...
Convincing Ground massacre in which between 60 and 200 members of a Gunditjmara clan were killed by whale-hunters at Portland Bay. After his return,...
The Pinjarra massacre, also known as the Battle of Pinjarra, occurred on 28 October 1834 in Pinjarra, Western Australia when a group of Binjareb Noongar...
occupied the land south of the Swan and Canning rivers, as far south as Mangles Bay. The group had customary land usage rights over a much larger area than this...
Battle of Broken River, also known as the Faithfull Massacre, sometimes spelt Faithful Massacre, took place in 1838 when 20 Aboriginal Australians attacked...
this region included several massacres of Indigenous people, including the Waterloo Creek massacre and Myall Creek massacres in 1838, and did not end until...
The Hospital Creek Massacre refers to a retaliatory mass-slaughter of Indigenous Australians in 1859 in rural New South Wales at Hospital Creek about 10km...
The Richmond River massacres were a series of murders of groups of Indigenous Australians and European Australians in the region around the Richmond River...
The Fighting Hills massacre occurred on 8 March 1840 when Victorian Western District squatters killed 51 Aboriginal people of The Hummocks, near Wando...
retribution for the killing of two settlers and the theft of food, in the WaterlooBaymassacre at Elliston on the west coast of Eyre Peninsula. As Europeans spread...
Murdering Gully massacre also took place (1839, with 35-40 Aboriginal people killed), and another massacre reported at a track called Waterloo Lane. British...
Convincing Ground Massacre was a massacre of the Indigenous Gunditjmara people Kilcarer gundidj clan by British settler whalers based at Portland Bay in South-Eastern...
Global Information