Journal of Genocide Research

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The Pinjarra Massacre in the Age of the Statue

Wars

Ann Curthoys & Shino Konishi

To cite this article: Ann Curthoys & Shino Konishi (2022) The Pinjarra Massacre
in the Age of the Statue Wars, Journal of Genocide Research, 24:4, 511-528, DOI:
10.1080/14623528.2021.2023986

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2021.2023986

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JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH
2022, VOL. 24, NO. 4, 511–528
https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2021.2023986

The Pinjarra Massacre in the Age of the Statue Wars

Ann Curthoysa and Shino Konishi b

a
School of History, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia; bInstitute for Humanities and Social
Sciences, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The Pinjarra Massacre of 1834 was a large-scale colonial attack on Received 12 August 2021
Aboriginal people in Western Australia. Led by Governor James Accepted 24 December 2021
Stirling, a party of British police, soldiers and settlers ambushed a
KEYWORDS
group of Bindjareb Noongar, killing of at least 15 Bindjareb Pinjarra; massacre; stirling;
Noongar men by Stirling’s reckoning, and as many as 80 men, statue; Bindjareb Noongar
women, and children by other accounts. Though the event was
widely recorded in the nineteenth-century, this massacre was
effaced in the commemoration of its leader – Governor Stirling.
This article will trace the history of the massacre and how it has
been remembered, the troubled history of a statue of Stirling
which still stands in the city of Perth, and the fight by Bindjareb
Noongar to establish a memorial to the victims.

Historians of genocide seek to understand how genocides are remembered by perpetra-

tors, victims, descendants, and subsequent generations. Such understanding involves
tracing how events that may be considered genocidal are conceptualized and named,
who among the victims and the perpetrators are remembered and memorialized, and
what forms these memories and memorials take. While the case of Turkish remembrance
of the Armenian genocide is perhaps the most outstanding example of disputed naming
and historical memory, settler colonial societies such as the United States, South Africa,
Australia, Canada, and New Zealand have also produced highly contested memories of
their violent past. Indigenous peoples have remembered and honoured their ancestors
as victims of a brutal process of invasion and dispossession, while dominant populations
have frequently honoured those who oversaw, conducted, and benefited from that same
process. These contests over the history of colonization have occurred in many cultural
sites, such as school textbooks, academic texts, national public holidays, museums, and
monuments. In these counterposed historical memories, a major point of contention
has been the idea that colonization could become, and often was, a genocidal process.
This was especially true in Australia’s “history wars” of the early 2000s, as A. Dirk Moses
has pointed out, and such differences continue still.1
In recent years, especially in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and its
reverberations around the world, statues have become an important site of contestation
and struggle for decolonization. In this essay we explore the controversy surrounding the

CONTACT Shino Konishi Shino.konishi@acu.edu.au

1
A. Dirk Moses, “Moving the Genocide Debate beyond the History Wars,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 54, no.
2 (2008): 248–70.
© 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
512 A. CURTHOYS AND S. KONISHI

statue of Governor James Stirling, from 1829 to 1839 the founding governor of the colony
of Western Australia, now Australia’s largest state. We begin with the attacks on and calls
for removal of the Stirling statue from public display in Perth, the state’s capital city, in the
context of the statue wars emerging from the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. The
statue’s opponents argued that Stirling should not be honoured as a hero because, on 28
October 1834, he led a massacre of between 15 and 80 Bindjareb Noongar people at Pin-
jarra, a site ninety kilometres south of Perth.2 We then examine in detail what happened at
Pinjarra in 1834, examining the uncharacteristically detailed perpetrator accounts and
drawing on the significant existing historical literature on these events.3 Next we trace
the history of the statue from early proposals in the 1920s to its eventual erection over
fifty years later and its subsequent intermittent display. We conclude with the creation
by Bindjareb Noongar of a Pinjarra massacre memorial on site and the unfinished business
still surrounding memorialization of this troubled period in Australia’s history. This is a
complex story of historical consciousness demonstrating that colonizer statues may in
fact mean very little to the people who are meant to revere them, and that criticism of
them is far from new.

Controversy over James Stirling’s statue

Following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on 25 May 2020, protestors
held a series of rallies across the globe to demonstrate their solidarity with the Black
Lives Matter (BLM) movement and protest against police brutality. “I can’t breathe,” the
words Floyd cried out as one officer knelt on his neck during his arrest, became the rallying
cry for the movement. Floyd’s words had particular resonance in Australia, recalling the
2015 death of Dunghutti man David Dungay Jr in similar circumstances at Sydney’s Long
Bay Gaol. Despite the COVID-19 restrictions demanding social distancing and banning
protest marches, thousands signed up online to join BLM protests in Australia’s capital
cities. Their aim was not just to support the global BLM movement, but also highlight Aus-
tralia’s appalling Indigenous deaths in custody record, and memorialize the 470 Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander people who, like Dungay Jr, had died in police custody since the
Australian Government’s Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991.4
The BLM movement’s focus is not only contemporary racism but also symbols of white
supremacy, not least statues and monuments glorifying historical “figures whose reputa-
tions (and fortunes) were built on the crushing of peoples of colour and the stifling of
2
For another consideration of the Stirling statue and its critics, see Jenny Gregory, “Dark Pasts in the Landscape: Statue
Wars in Western Australia,” Public History Review 28 (2021): 1–9. Note also that alternative spellings for Bindjareb
include Pindjarup and Pinjareb.
3
The main accounts are Ronald Richards, The Murray District of Western Australia: a history (Pinjarra: Shire of Murray,
1978), chapters 5 and 6; Neville Green, Broken Spears: Aboriginals and Europeans in the southwest of Australia
(Perth: Focus Education Services, 1984), 99–106; John Mulvaney, Encounters in Place: Outsiders and Aboriginal Austra-
lians 1606–1985 (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1989), 168–71; Natalie Contos, Theo A. Kearing, the Murray
Districts Aboriginal Association, Len Collard, and Dave Palmer, Pinjarra Massacre Site Research and Development Project
Report for State 1 (Pinjarra: Murray Districts Aboriginal Association, June 1998); Pamela Statham-Drew, James Stirling:
admiral and founding governor of Western Australia (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2003), 260–71; and
Pamela Statham-Drew, “Stirling and Pinjarra: a battle in more ways than one,” Studies in Western Australian History 23
(2003): 167–94.
4
Maani Truu, “George Floyd: How a nine minute video reignited a decades-old civil rights movement in Australia,” SBS
News, 21 April 2021, https://www.sbs.com.au/news/george-floyd-how-a-nine-minute-video-reignited-a-decades-old-
civil-rights-movement-in-australia
 JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 513

indigenous cultures.”5 Debates which began with the Rhodes Must Fall movement in
2015, focussing on Cecil Rhodes, an architect of British imperialism in southern Africa,
were reignited by Floyd’s murder. Across the United States, statues of confederates
were toppled, defaced, or removed, and elsewhere in the world imperial and colonial
figures, especially those implicated in slavery, were similarly dispatched. A significant
moment for the statue wars in Western Australia happened in the United Kingdom: on
7 June 2020 the statue of seventeenth-century slaver Edward Colston was toppled into
the Bristol harbour.
Upon seeing images of this, Western Australian Greens senator Jordan Steele-John
tweeted “[i]t’s great to see these symbols of white supremacy being torn down.” Reflect-
ing on Western Australia’s monuments, he felt that it was “[t]ime to stop celebrating these
men and hold them accountable for the roles they played in WA’s history of First Nations
Genecide [sic].” Steele-John refuted criticisms that his tweets were an “incitement to crim-
inal behaviour, anarchy and vandalism,” insisting he was compelled to reflect on local
“place names and statues” commemorating men who “engaged in, perpetrated or nor-
malised horrific violence against First Nations peoples.” He singled out the colony’s
founder James Stirling and surveyor-general John Septimus Roe, asserting “they are the
perpetrators of a significant massacre.”6
Arguments like Steele-John’s are often criticized by opponents as a “left sort of fringe”
preoccupation with “trying to edit our history,” as former Australian Prime Minister
Malcolm Turnbull argued in 2017. “We can’t get into this sort of Stalinist exercise of
trying to white out or obliterate or blank out parts of our history,” he exclaimed,
because “[a]ll of those statues, all of those monuments, are part of our history and we
should respect them and preserve them.”7 Yet, rather than seeking to obliterate a
respected history, proponents like Steele-John advocate creating “a space for truth to
be told,” by uncovering or acknowledging an unspoken history of colonial violence left
silent by these mute statues.8
Within days, Steele-John’s speculations were realized. On 12 June 2020, the day before
the planned BLM rally in Perth, Western Australia, local musician Malachy John O’Connor
was arrested for vandalizing the central business district’s bronze statue of Captain James
Stirling. That afternoon he sprayed the statue’s hands and neck red and painted an Abori-
ginal flag over its plaque. Although the paint was quickly removed, images were pub-
lished online and remain in circulation. (See Figure 1a and b). O’Connor did not target
Stirling’s statue simply because it was “a figure from Australia’s colonial era.”9 He specifi-
cally defaced it because of Stirling’s active involvement in the 1834 Pinjarra massacre; in
his words, because “the man behind the likeness of that statue murdered up to about 150
Indigenous people.” O’Connor had a history of agitating for the statue’s removal, having
previously written to the City of Perth arguing it is “culturally insensitive that [Stirling’s

5
Kelly Grovier, “Black Lives Matter Protests: Why are statues so powerful?,” BBC Online, 10 June 2020, https://www.bbc.
com/culture/article/20200612-black-lives-matter-protests-why-are-statues-so-powerful
6
Nathan Hondros, “WA Greens senator cops spray for inciting ’anarchy and vandalism’ in historical statue tweets,” WA
Today, 10 June 2020, https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/wa-greens-senator-cops-spray-for-
inciting-anarchy-and-vandalism-in-historical-statue-tweets-20200610-p5518a.html
7
Alison Bevage, “Australia’s PM says changing statues, rewriting history is ‘Stalinist,’” Reuters APAC, 25 August 2017,
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-statue-idUSKCN1B50OY
8
Hondros, “WA Greens senator cops spray.”
9
“Perth man charged after statue vandalised,” Australian Associated Press, 15 June 2020.
514 A. CURTHOYS AND S. KONISHI

Figure 1. (a and b) Sir James Stirling statue. Credit: Images from the City of Perth Cultural Collections.

statue] stands outside the City of Perth Library containing works about those murders he
committed.” Moreover, the statue was only “200 m from the District Court of Western Aus-
tralia,” highlighting for him, and others, the direct connection between past colonial atro-
cities and contemporary deaths in custody.10
This was not the only defacement of Stirling’s statue. Three months later, on 13 Sep-
tember 2020, the HEAVY DUTY artist collective initiated “The Statue Review,” replacing
the statue’s inscription which read “Founder Governor of Western Australia” with a new
magnetized plaque stating:
Captain James Stirling

Governor of Western Australia

On 28 October 1834 Captain Stirling led the Pinjarra Massacre, an attack on the Binjareb
Noongar camp that killed up to 80 Noongar men, women, and children.

He belongs in a museum, not on our streets.

The Statue Review.

See figure 2a and 2b HEAVY DUTY member Chris explained that their aim was to high-
light that the statue’s commemoration of Stirling as a “founder” masked the “shocking side
of history that wasn’t being told,” the Pinjarra massacre. He observed that “we need to be
really wary of First Nations’ peoples and their feelings towards these statues.”11 In many

10
Shannon Hampton, “Vandal faces the music,” The West Australian, 27 June 2020.
11
“Perth artists replace plaques on CBD statues to tell the ‘whole story’ of WA’s complex history,” Breakfast with Russell
Woolfe, ABC Radio Perth, 16 September 2020, https://www.abc.net.au/radio/perth/programs/breakfast/plaques-
covered-on-perth-statues/12668894 They added an identical plaque with the same description of the Pinjarra mas-
sacre on the statue of fellow perpetrator John Septimus Roe, located nearby on the corner of Victoria Avenue and
 JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 515

Figure 2. (a and b) Sir James Stirling Statue. Credit: HEAVY DUTY, by permission.

ways, his sentiments reflect views expressed by many Indigenous commentators in the
wake of the toppling of Colston’s statue. For example, in describing the statue of South Aus-
tralia’s Charles Cameron Kingston, acknowledged as an “originator of the White Australia
policy,” Natasha Wanganeen commented that, ‘[l]ooking at that statue every day as an
Aboriginal woman, walking out of my house, it is a mental health trigger.”12

Stirling and the Pinjarra Massacre

When Stirling gathered together a party of police, soldiers, and settlers and led them to
Pinjarra to quell Bindjareb resistance to the spread of settlement, it was only five years
after the process of colonization had begun. In June 1829, ships began arriving from
Britain bringing settlers and their servants to what was at first called the Swan River
Colony. Almost immediately beset by failed farms, intra-colonial squabbles, financial fail-
ures, and inadequate supplies of labour, the colony quickly developed a reputation in
England as a failure.13 At the same time, the colonizers faced strong resistance from
local Noongar people, and as Ann Hunter shows, the legal position on how the govern-
ment and settlers ought to respond to Noongar resistance was unclear. Stirling’s detailed
instructions, received in April 1832, were a contradictory mix, mandating the legal protec-
tion of Aboriginal people under British law, but at the same time authorizing the use of
force to quell resistance and protect settlers and their property.14 The British

Adelaide Terrace, Perth. This statue was sculpted by Greg James in 1990 and donated to the City of Perth in 2007 by
MacCormac Architects.
12
Cameron Slessor and Eugene Boisvert, “Black Lives Matter protest renew push to remove ‘racist’ monuments to colo-
nial figures,” ABC News, 10 June 2020.
13
For the most detailed biography of James Stirling, see Statham-Drew, James Stirling.
14
Ann Hunter, A Different Kind of Subject: Colonial Law in Aboriginal-European Relations in Nineteenth Century Western
Australia 1829–61 (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2012), 6–7.
516 A. CURTHOYS AND S. KONISHI

government’s inconsistent instructions left the governor with considerable discretion;

one solution Stirling adopted in May 1832 was to declare Aboriginal leaders as outlaws,
and thus not deserving of legal protection.15
After a troubled first three years, Stirling took a two-year leave of absence in England from
August 1832, during which time he was knighted. In the interim, the colony was governed by
a succession of military men – Captain Frederick Irwin, Captain Richard Daniell, and Captain
Picton Beete. Under their leadership, conflict in the Perth district with the local Whadjuk
Noongar peaked in 1833 resulting in the deaths of key Aboriginal leaders. Colonial authorities
outlawed and in May 1833 executed an elder named Midgegooroo, and two months later
outlawed his son, Yagan, resulting in Yagan’s execution by two youths enticed by the
promise of a bounty.16 The shock to Whadjuk Noongar of losing two of its most important
leaders was exacerbated by the desecration of Yagan’s body; his distinguishing scarification
marks were flayed and his body decapitated, with his head taken to England where it was
displayed in a museum.17 The killing of such leaders meant that by 1834, with Stirling still
away, conflict with Whadjuk Noongar clans in the Perth district was waning.
Attacks, however, by other Noongar dialectal groups to the north, east, and south of the
settlement continued, to which authorities responded with flogging and imprisonment at
Fremantle Gaol.18 Calyute, a leader of the Bindjareb Noongar to the south of the settlement,
who had led a raid on a leading settler’s flour mill, was held in confinement and twice
flogged with sixty lashes. After his release, he and several others on 15 July 1834 attacked
two settlers at Mandurah, a coastal settlement south of Perth, killing a young servant
named Hugh Nesbitt.19 Calling on a long British imperial tradition, settlers immediately
demanded a punitive expedition not only to kill the perpetrators but also to collectively
punish their families in an attempt to terrorize the Bindjareb into submission. In the colo-
nization of Australia, such expeditions were sometimes settler-initiated and sometimes
government-initiated, sometimes reactive and sometimes pre-emptive, but always
designed to terrorize Indigenous peoples against further resistance to British settlement.
Stirling arrived back in the colony, at King George’s Sound, on 19 June 1834 and
immediately resumed duty as governor. However, it would be seven weeks before he
was able to reach the seat of government in Perth, finally arriving there on 19
August.20 He became increasingly concerned that the colony was in a weak position, des-
tined to be overrun and destroyed. With only 1,800 settlers, including officials and the
military, it was still a tiny settlement. Noongar responses were sporadic and appeared
uncoordinated, but Stirling feared the different Aboriginal groups would unite and threa-
ten the colony’s future. As he put it in a letter to the Secretary of State in Britain after the
massacre had occurred, “There was danger, that their success in this species of warfare
might tempt other tribes to pursue the same course, and eventually combine together
for the extermination of the whites.”21 Barry Morris has pointed out in relation to New

15
Hunter, A Different Kind of Subject, 18.
16
“Yagan and Heegan, Two Natives Shot. William Keats, A Youth, speared,” Perth Gazette, 13 July 1833, and Green, Broken
Spears, 87.
17
Cressida Fforde, “Yagan,” in The dead and their possessions: repatriation in principle, policy and practice, ed. Cressida
Fforde, Jane Hubert, Paul Turnbull (New York: Routledge, 2002), 229–41.
18
Green, Broken Spears, 92.
19
Perth Gazette, 26 July 1834, 326–7.
20
Perth Gazette, 19 July 1834, 321 and Perth Gazette, 23 August 1834, 342.
21
Stirling to Stanley, letter no 14, 1 November 1834, cited in Contos et al, Pinjarra Massacre Site, 146–7.
 JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 517

South Wales, and we can see it here in Stirling, the “spectre of an ‘Aboriginal rising’ gave
expression to the fears that haunted the colonial project, that is, that a collective and sus-
tained Aboriginal resistance could menace and potentially overturn colonial
occupation.”22
Stirling then ceased declaring Noongar leaders outlaws and turned to a military sol-
ution.23 To protect settler expansion southwards, where he had already selected land for
himself, it became clear that a military garrison would be needed at or near Pinjarra. He
re-established the Mounted Police Corps, selecting three experienced officers and seven
privates, in readiness for a direct attack on Calyute and his warriors.24 With the killing of
Nesbitt providing an excuse for action, he organized the punitive expedition to the Pin-
jarra area that local settlers wanted. Roe joined the expedition party in order to inspect
the country and to plan the military garrison and future settlement. Like Stirling, Roe
had a naval education and experience, though he was from a modest clerical back-
ground in contrast to Stirling’s wealthy extended family, which had made a fortune
from unfree labour and slavery in the Caribbean.25 Roe’s journal entries concerning
the Pinjarra expedition are now amongst the most detailed accounts we have.26 They
describe the separate departures and gathering together of the various members of
the party over three days as it travelled south to Pinjarra. Having camped overnight,
he noted, the expedition party reached a large group of Bindjareb at Pinjarra at 8.35
am on 28 October. On arrival, Captain Ellis, Captain Norcott, and three mounted
police approached the group to determine if this was, indeed, the tribe of Calyute.
They saw that it was, though Calyute himself was probably not present. None of the
reports mention sighting him specifically, and several captured Bindjareb women
later reported that he was away in another part of the country.27 Stirling’s party
decided to attack, surrounding the group from three different vantage points in such
a way that they would be trapped.
The eyewitness accounts from the members of the punitive expedition emphasise that
at first the Bindjareb resisted. According to an anonymous account by a member of the
party, published in the Perth Gazette three days later, as soon as they saw the police,
the Bindjareb men “seized their numerous and recently made spears, and showed a for-
midable front.”28 When this did not stop the police advance, they “sullenly retreated.”29
The Binjareb continued to throw spears as they “retreated to the river” and the military
continued to fire.30 Their retreat was blocked by a second contingent, this one headed
by Stirling, prompting those under attack to hide in the water and among the riverbank
bushes and logs, where, in Roe’s words, they were “picked off by the party on either

22
Barry Morris, “Frontier colonialism as a culture of terror,” Journal of Australian Studies 16, no. 35 (2009): 76.
23
Hunter, A Different Kind of Subject, 25.
24
Green, Broken Spears, 97.
25
Georgina Arnott, “WA’s first governor James Stirling had links to slavery, as well as directing a massacre. Should he be
honoured?,” The Conversation, 8 June 2021.
26
See ‘Extract from Capt. J.S. Roe’s Registered Fieldbook #3: 25th – 28th October 1834’, in the appendix to Contos et al,
Pinjarra Massacre Site, 148–50, hereafter cited as Roe Journal. The original diaries are held by the State Library of
Western Australia.
27
Anonymous, “Encounter with the natives in the Pinjarra District on the banks of the Murray,” Perth Gazette, 1 November
1834, 383.
28
Anon, “Encounter with the Natives in the Pinjarra District,” 383.
29
For the suggestion that the anonymous author of this report was probably Captain Norcott, see Statham-Drew, “Stir-
ling and Pinjarra,” 177.
30
Anon, “Encounter with the Natives in the Pinjarra District,” 383.
518 A. CURTHOYS AND S. KONISHI

shore.”31 Roe, who was unarmed, had taken up a position with four soldiers further south
along the river; from there he could hear the firing and the voices of the retreating Bind-
jareb “for upwards of an hour.” Roe emphasised that the natives resisted; despite being
“crouched in very small and scarcely discernible holes and places, and in many instances
had immersed themselves in water, having only their nose and mouth above water,
nevertheless threw numerous spears with amazing precision and force.” It was not
enough, however, and the shooting continued unabated. “In this way,” records Roe,
“between 15 and 20 were shot dead, very few of the wounded being suffered to
escape,” until the party considered that the punishment had been “sufficiently
exemplary.”32
The Perth Gazette participant observer thought the number killed was higher, saying
that “the cross fire from both banks” continued “until between 25 and 30 were left
dead on the field and in the river.” He thought also that it was “very probable that
more men were killed in the river and floated down with the stream,” to the extent
that about half of the Binjareb’s male population had been killed. On the question
of who was killed, the Perth Gazette says it was mainly men but also included one
woman and several children, and one of the eight women taken prisoners had been
injured. Natalie Contos et al question this report, suggesting the victims were
mainly women and children.33 Their view reflects the testimony of Yaburgurt (also
known as George Winjan), a child survivor of the massacre and later Bindjareb
leader: “They rush camp. They shoot-em man, shoot-em gin [women], shoot-em pica-
ninnies [children], and they shoot-em dogs too.”34 In any case, some women were
detained for a period and then released, after being told that “if they again offered
to spear white men or their cattle, or to revenge in any way the punishment which
had just been inflicted on them for their numerous murders and outrages, four
times the present number of men would proceed amongst them and destroy every
man, woman and child.”35 In his report to the Secretary of State for the Colonies
four days later, Governor Stirling gives a similar account of the threat to the
women. The women, he says, were informed that.
… the punishment had been inflicted because of the misconduct of the tribe; that the white
men never forgot to punish murder; that on this occasion the women and children had been
spared; but if any other person should be killed by them, not one would be allowed to remain
alive on this side of the mountains.36

The estimate of the numbers killed has been the subject of dispute, as it has for many
such punitive expeditions, where figures vary according to the allegiances and the proxi-
mity in time and space of those making the estimate.37 Further complicating the figures in
the contemporary records is a relatively little-known 1927 article by Jane Elizabeth Grose,

31
Roe Journal, 149.
32
Roe Journal, 150.
33
Contos et al, Pinjarra Massacre Site, 37–41.
34
Ronald Richards, Murray and Mandurah: A sequel history of the Old Murray District of Western Australia (Pinjarra: Shire of
Murray and City of Mandurah, 1993), 8, cited in Jennifer Harris, “Memorials and Trauma: Pinjarra 1834,” in Trauma,
Media, Art: New Perspectives, ed. Mick Broderick and Antonio Traverso (Newcastle-upon-tyne: Cambridge Scholars Pub-
lisher, 2010), 47.
35
Our emphasis. Anon, “Encounter with the Natives in the Pinjarra District,” 383.
36
Stirling to Stanley, 1 November 1834, 147.
37
Morris, “Frontier Colonialism as a Culture of Terror,” 76–7.
 JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 519

citing her settler grandfather’s journal: “About 80 blacks were killed and … about 50
natives were buried in one great hole.”38 Further, Noongar oral histories collected in
1973 asserted that 750 people were killed, an “impossible” figure which John Mulvaney
suggests is not necessarily an actual death toll, but instead indicates the degree of
trauma suffered by the Bindjareb, not just physically, but also politically, socially and cul-
turally.39 Perhaps we will never know the number of Bindjareb people who died at the site
or later from injuries.
Whatever the number killed, this was undoubtedly a massacre. In their discussion of
massacres, archaeologists Mirani Litster and Lynley Wallis, describe the dynamic
between the two groups involved in terms that fit the events at Pinjarra very well:
Victims – a group comprising more than one person, typically possessing inferior weaponry
with which to defend themselves; and,

Perpetrators – another group, who distinguish themselves from their victims by having the
power to kill without substantial risk of physically injuring themselves, and who might gen-
erally be considered to have instigated the event.40

When Pamela Statham-Drew, Stirling’s biographer, approached the controversial ques-

tion of whether these events are best described as a battle or a massacre, she favoured
the term battle on the grounds that even when surrounded and overpowered, the sur-
prised and trapped Bindjareb people had “bravely fought an unwinnable contest.”41
Yet armed and resistant people can still be subject to massacre; the victims’ resistance
does not mean a massacre did not occur.
No other punitive expedition in the Australian colonies was, or would be, led by a gov-
ernor. To his surprise, Stirling found that while local press and settlers praised him for his
decisive action, there were dissenting voices. The British authorities were far from pleased.
A new British government was elected in April 1835, in which evangelical influence was
strong, affecting Aboriginal policy. Lord Glenelg, as Secretary of State for the Colonies,
was shocked when he learned that Stirling himself had led a military action against Abori-
ginal people and censured him in a despatch on 23 July 1835.42 The House of Commons
Select Committee on Aborigines in British Settlements in 1837 commented that Stirling’s
party had failed to confine “their vengeance to the actual murderers,” and condemned
acts of “indiscriminate punishment” and “threats extending to the destruction of
women and children.”43 Similar acts of collective punishment were deemed criminal in
1838, when an unofficial settler party attacked a group of Wirrayaraay Kamilaroi at
Myall Creek in New South Wales. The change in British government policy meant that
Governor George Gipps oversaw and supported a legal process which ultimately led to
the conviction and execution of the perpetrators.44

38
Chris Owen, “The Pinjarra massacre: it’s time to speak the truth of this terrible slaughter,” The Guardian, 17 November 2019.
Grose’s article was recently brought to light by historian Chris Owen, and perhaps influenced HEAVY DUTY’s plaque.
39
John Mulvaney, Encounters in Place: Outsider and Aboriginal Australians, 1606–1985 (St Lucia: University of Queensland
Press, 1989), 170.
40
Mirani Litster and Lynley A. Wallis, “Looking for the proverbial needle? The archaeology of Australian colonial frontier
massacres,” Archaeology in Oceania 46, no. 3 (2011): 106.
41
Statham-Drew, “Stirling and Pinjarra,” 192; Statham-Drew, Stirling, 270.
42
Extracts quoted in the Perth Gazette, 30 July 1836, 736 and in Paul Hasluck, Black Australians: A Survey of Native Policy in
Western Australia, 1829–1897 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1970 [1942]), 50.
43
Quoted in Hunter, A Different Kind of Subject, 74.
44
See Jane Lydon and Lyndall Ryan, eds., Remembering the Myall Creek Massacre (Sydney: NewSouth, 2018).
520 A. CURTHOYS AND S. KONISHI

Bindjareb people survived the massacre and continued to live on their own country, as
they do today. Stirling had, though, seriously damaged their capacity for resistance, and
the survivors were forced to find new ways, such as working for settlers and protecting
their families, to maintain their community in the face of colonization. Furthermore, for
decades the Pinjarra massacre continued to reverberate through settler-Indigenous
relations in Western Australia. As colonizers encroached further into Noongar land, the
pattern of Noongar resistance and punitive expeditions would continue, first in Ballar-
dong Noongar Country in the Avon Valley and subsequently further north and east.
The Pinjarra massacre was frequently referred to when authorities, wishing to deter Abori-
ginal groups from resisting settlement, threatened another “Pinjarra style” action, or a
“second Pinjarra.”45 Thus Pinjarra became synonymous with an exemplary form of colo-
nial violence, acting as a deterrent against Aboriginal people questioning or disrupting
settler rule. Further massacres did occur, but the details were usually hidden from
public view in order not to attract British government censure.
Other forms of punishment and deterrence were also vigorously pursued. From 1838 in
Western Australia, Indigenous men convicted of stealing or committing inter se crimes
such as payback killings were often sent to an island off the coast of Perth that
Noongar knew as Wadjemup and settlers called Rottnest Island, which became an
especially feared and hated site of punishment. Given the difficulty in taking arrested
people to court over vast distances, local authorities often preferred a policy of
summary trial and punishment on the spot (which usually meant whipping) of Aboriginal
offenders.46 Inherited from both the British convict system and from Caribbean slavery,
whipping would persist in Western Australian practice and legislation for decades to
come. Capital punishment was another weapon in the colony’s arsenal against Indigen-
ous opponents; men found guilty in court of the murder of settlers were hung from
1840 onward.47 Even with all these techniques at the disposal of the colonial authorities,
massacres perpetrated by settlers and police would continue as settlement expanded,
rising to a peak in the Kimberley region in the late nineteenth century – a period remem-
bered by Aboriginal people as “the killing time” – and extending, in the case of the Forrest
River massacre in 1926, into the twentieth.48

Contested statues of Stirling and Yagan

The creation and erection of a statue commemorating Stirling was not a product of settler
society enthusiasm and patriotism, as might be assumed, but instead reflected the endea-
vour of a select few “privileged” individuals.49 As the centenary of the founding of the
colony of Western Australia loomed in the 1920s, a group of history-minded citizens
including journalist and university student, Paul Hasluck, were prompted to form the

45
An early example of newspaper commentary is “Robbery committed by the York natives, and seizure of two of the
party,” Perth Gazette, 1 April 1837, 876: with response by L. Giustiniani, Swan River Guardian, 27 April 1837, 108.
46
Hunter, A Different Kind of Subject, 201–20.
47
Hunter, A Different Kind of Subject, 118–9.
48
Chris Owen, Every Mother’s Son is Guilty: Policing the Kimberley Frontier of Western Australia 1882–1905 (Crawley: UWA
Publishing, 2016). For the Forrest River Massacre of 1926, which has been the subject of historiographical dispute, see
Neville Green, The Forrest River Massacre (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1995); Noel Loos, White Christ, Black
Cross, (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007), 100–16, and notes on 193–4.
49
For a broader discussion see Richard Drayton, “Rhodes Must Not Fall?,” Third Text 33, no. 4–5 (2019): 553.
 JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 521

Royal Western Australian Historical Society (RWAHS) in September 1926.50 To celebrate

the state’s centenary in 1929, the RWAHS decided it was “time to erect a statue of the
state’s founder.” The Society may have been encouraged by the success of the shilling
fund for a memorial to mark the Jubilee of former premier, John Forrest, which success-
fully raised £1800, and resulted in the unveiling of his statue in King’s Park’s prestigious
memorial row in 1927.51 Forrest was well remembered (having only died in 1918) and
appealed to the public’s liking for “bush pioneer” figures, and as the colony’s first
premier represented the state’s political autonomy.52
The story of Stirling’s statue presented a stark contrast. The RWAHS devoted £25,
equivalent to a little over $2000 today, and requested subscriptions from “the public
who will,” they believed, “welcome the opportunity to give honour where honour is
due.”53 The state government pledged £50 to stimulate public donations, with Premier
Philip Collier predicting that “the citizens of Perth” will give Stirling “a fitting memorial.”54
Yet after two months, only “£8 to £10” was donated, a far cry from the £1000 anticipated
by the RWAHS. The Society’s president Sir James Mitchell blamed the government, com-
plaining that it should fully “bear the cost,” but as this was unlikely, the RWAHS instead
launched a “state-wide appeal.”55 Paul Hasluck, the honorary secretary, reminded the
public that the state’s foundation was thanks to Stirling’s “own energy in promoting colo-
nisation.”56 But the people remained unmoved, and after eight years only £150 had been
collected. Insufficient funds forced the Society to shelve its plans.57 While the Great
Depression probably inhibited donations, economic hardship was never explicitly cited
as cause for the moribund fundraising. Low public interest in a Stirling statue probably
stemmed from the fact he was not well remembered, and associated with the trouble-
stricken early colonial period.
While interest in a Stirling statue languished, less expensive forms of official remem-
brance were adopted.58 The Stirling name, already ascribed to a number of places includ-
ing the Stirling Range in 1835, was also given to a major highway in 1932, a dam in 1947, a
town in 1959, and a municipal council in 1971.
For some, naming was not enough. As the sesquicentenary approached, Hasluck
remained committed to the idea of a statue. Since the state’s Centenary he had forged
an illustrious career as a historian, journalist, federal government minister, and gover-
nor-general of Australia (1969–1974). He was also an architect of Aboriginal assimilation.
In the 1930s, he toured the Kimberley, reporting on the Moseley Royal Commission’s

50
“A Brief History,” Royal Western Australian Historical Society, https://www.histwest.org.au/brief-history (accessed 21
December 2021), Anne Porter, ‘Birtwhistle, Ivor Treharne (1892–1976)’ and Malcolm Allbrook, “Hasluck, Sir Paul
Meernaa (1905–1993),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/hasluck-sir-paul-
meernaa-18555 (accessed 21 December 2021).
51
“Sir John Forrest’s Jubilee: Proposal for a statue,” Sun, 15 August 1915, and “Statue of Lord Forrest,” Sydney Morning
Herald, 26 June 1923.
52
Governor William Campion cited in “Governor’s Holiday: Visit to England: Admiration for Pioneers,” The West Australian,
7 January 1929.
53
“State Centenary: Sir James Stirling,” West Australian, 3 July 1929.
54
“Stirling Memorial: Government Supports Fund,” West Australian, 9 October 1929.
55
“Stirling Memorial: Appeal Meets with Poor Response,” West Australian, 2 December 1929.
56
“Memorial to Sir James Stirling,” Great Southern Leader, 13 June 1930.
57
F. I. Bray, Chairman, Memorials Committee, W.A. Historical Society to A. Berkeley, Under Treasurer, The Treasury, 5 May
1937, WA State Records Office, Premier’s Department: WA Historical Society, 433/29; A. Berkeley, Under Treasurer, The
Treasury to Chairman, Memorials Committee, W.A. Historical Society, 18 June 1937, WA State Records Office, Premier’s
Department: WA Historical Society, 433/29.
58
“State News Summary,” Western Mail, 24 November 1949, 14.
522 A. CURTHOYS AND S. KONISHI

investigation of the condition and treatment of Aboriginal people.59 This experience

shaped his belief that Aboriginal people could only advance as individuals by relinquish-
ing their group identity and distinct culture. He tried to implement this policy of cultural
genocide as the federal Minister for Territories (1951 to 1963) advocating cultural assim-
ilation, and the need for a “single British Australian society.”60 Hasluck attributed the
strengths of Australia’s heritage to its inherited British culture, traditions, religious faith,
and civilization that the “first settlers brought to this land,” and which linked it to a
wider Anglo world. For Hasluck, an opportunity to celebrate this “national heritage”
arose in the lead up to Western Australia’s sesquicentenary.61
In 1978 the Western Australian government called for ideas to celebrate the upcoming
sesquicentenary, prompting Noongar leader Ken Colbung to suggest the government
fund a commemorative statue of Yagan. Quoting the 1833 Perth Gazette’s description
of Yagan as “a patriot and a warrior … the Wallace of the age,” Colbung argued that
“[t]here is no doubt that Yagan is part of this State’s history and that his memory is ven-
erated by Aborigines.” This was a revolutionary proposal, as there were no other bronze
sculptures memorializing an Aboriginal person at that time in Australia.62 Confident that
he would receive a positive response, Colbung commissioned sculptor Robert Hitchcock
to produce a maquette, and when the proposed 3.6 m bronze statue was costed at
$30,000, suggesting that the Aboriginal Lands Trust could contribute $10,000 if the gov-
ernment paid the balance.63
Concerned that Yagan was “something of an outlaw,” Premier Charles Court sought the
confidential advice of Hasluck and his wife Alexandra, a freelance historian who had
researched Yagan.64 Hasluck argued that if there were to be a statue of an Aboriginal it
should not be Yagan, who “seems not a leader of his people but rather a tragic individual
figure.” He warned Court that many would think it strange to commemorate the founding
of Western Australia “by a statue to Yagan and not to Stirling, who had much more to do
with the founding than Yagan had.”65 Court invited Hasluck to suggest another suitable
“Aboriginal personality,” but he was unlikely to do so.66 While Hasluck claimed to
“respect” stories about Aboriginal “warriors” and “faithful helpers [to] the heroic pioneers,”
he did not perceive Aboriginal people as a “different group of Australians” with a separate
history. Nor did he believe an Aboriginal historical figure should be singled out in the Ses-
quicentenary commemorations: he assumed Aboriginal people would follow the path of
“minority groups” elsewhere, by “gradually chang[ing] their customs, los[ing] their

59
Anna Haebich, “The Formative Years: Paul Hasluck and Aboriginal Issues During the 1930s,” in Paul Hasluck in Austra-
lian History: civic personality and public life, ed. Tom Stannage, Kay Saunders and Richard Nile (St Lucia: University of
Queensland Press, 1998), 93–8.
60
Anthony Moran, “White Australia, Settler Nationalism and Aboriginal Assimilation,” Australian Journal of Politics and
History 51, no. 2 (2005): 186–7.
61
Paul Hasluck, Light that Time Has Made (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1995), 53–4, and 56.
62
Bronwen Batten and Paul Batten, “Memorialising the Past: Is there an Aboriginal way?,” Public History Review 15 (2008):
98. For details on specific memorials to Aboriginal individuals see “Indigenous,” Monuments Australia, https://
monumentaustralia.org.au/themes/people/indigenous (accessed 21 December 2021).
63
Ken Colbung to Charles Court, 28 July 1978, in “Yagan” Memorial, SRO 165/78, and David Pougher, “Yagan ‘not worth a
tribute’,” West Australian, 20 September 1978.
64
Premier Charles Court to The Rt. Hon. Sir Paul Hasluck, 1 August 1978, in “Yagan” Memorial, SRO 165/78.
65
Rt. Hon. Sir Paul Hasluck to Premier Charles Court, 4 August 1978, in “Yagan” Memorial, SRO 165/78 and reproduced in
Paul Hasluck, “Yagan Statue Opposed,” West Australian, 19 October 1978.
66
Premier Charles Court to The Rt. Hon. Sir Paul Hasluck, 1 August 1978, in “Yagan” Memorial, SRO 165/78.
 JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 523

identity and either disappear[ing] by merging with” the Anglo-Australian “majority or

accommodate[ing] themselves” to that “larger community.”67
When Court accepted the Haslucks’ advice not to proceed with a Yagan statue, he was
strongly criticized by many, including the editor of the West Australian who wrote: “Yagan
was respected by the first white settlers and his name still means much to the Aboriginal
members of the community. His commemoration would be eminently appropriate to next
year’s occasion.”68 Realizing that the statue had become a controversial issue, Court
announced that the government was now considering a mural instead. A furious
Colbung responded that a “mural of a large bloodstain,” would be an “apt memorial to
show that Aboriginal people have been continually knocking their heads against a
brick wall for 150 years and looked like doing it for the next 150.”69
As it turned out, neither a statue nor mural commemorating Aboriginal people was
erected for the sesquicentenary. Seven years later, however, a three-metre-tall bronze
sculpture of Yagan was unveiled on Matagarup (Heirrison Island), a significant Whadjuk
meeting place, Colbung having succeeded in raising funds from other sources.70
A statue of James Stirling was also erected for the sesquicentenary, but without gov-
ernment funding. After the imbroglio over the Yagan statue, Court could not allocate
public funds to a statue of Governor Stirling, but private donors came to the rescue,
very likely encouraged by the Premier.71 Local media organizations Channel 9 and
Radio 6KY funded a bronze statue of Stirling designed by Clement P. Somers, most
likely to the tune of $22,000, while mining company Hamersley Iron provided a four
tonne block of iron ore for the base.72 Thus, fifty years after first being proposed by
Hasluck and the RWAHS, a statue of Stirling was finally erected in front of the R & I
Bank in Barrack Street, Perth, the site where Stirling had staged the colony’s ceremonial
founding on 12 August 1829 by felling a tree. Prince Charles, formally unveiled the
statue on 10 March 1979, after attending a re-enactment of Stirling’s first landing. Fore-
shadowing the controversy that erupted in 2020, this unveiling ceremony was conducted
amidst Aboriginal protestors demanding Land Rights (see Figure 3). Rallied by the Black
Action Movement, protestors attempted to petition Charles to advocate on their behalf
for land rights and better conditions, but unable to approach, they chanted during the
ceremony.73
The statue’s existence was just as ignominious as its inception. When the bank building
was demolished in 1996, Stirling’s statue was stored at the Midland Railway Workshops
and soon forgotten. It was not until prompting by the West Australian that the statue
was found six years later, and moved to the Treasury Building. Then in 2012 when the
building was redeveloped, Stirling’s statue was again removed, and left in “limbo” for

67
Hasluck, Light that Time Has Made, 47, 50, 171, 172.
68
Pougher, “Yagan ‘not worth a tribute’”; “Yagan Statue,” West Australian, 17 October 1978.
69
Premier’s Department, Perth WA, “News Release,” 17 October 1978, in “Yagan” Memorial, SRO 165/78; “Colbung hits at
Yagan decision,” Daily News, 19 October 1978.
70
Bronwyn Batten and Paul Batten, “Memorialising the Past: Is There an Aboriginal Way?,” 98 and 100. Yagan’s statue
suffered defacement on multiple occasions, including decapitation by vandals in September 1997.
71
Premier Charles Court to Under Secretary, 17th October 1978, in “Yagan” Memorial, SRO 165/78.
72
Swan Television and Radio Broadcasters Perth, Western Australia, State Library of Western Australia, available at
https://purl.slwa.wa.gov.au/slwa_b3654898_35.pdf; W. F. Ellis, Director, to G. C. MacKinnon, Minister for Tourism, 27
October 1978, in SRO 150th Anniversary, “Aboriginal Groups,” SRO 150.5.8.
73
“Senator Chaney says: WA Aborigines have a point … ,” Daily News, 3 March 1979 and “Charles misses the Aboriginal
protestors,” Daily News, 10 March 1979.
524 A. CURTHOYS AND S. KONISHI

Figure 3. Prince Charles walks towards Stirling statue to perform the unveiling with Aboriginal
protestors in the background. Credit: Sourced from the collections of the State Library of Western
Australia and reproduced with the permission of the Library Board of Western Australia.

three years. Claiming that it took time to find a suitable location which adequately
reflected Stirling’s role as the “city’s founding father,” the Council finally placed the
statue in its current location in front of the City of Perth Library in 2015.74 Soon after
Noongar demanded the statue be removed altogether because of Stirling’s role in the Pin-
jarra massacre, which was supported by City of Fremantle councillor, Sam Wainwright in
2017.75 No action was taken, however, and the statue remained where it was until the
events of 2020. Rather than merely copying a “left sort of fringe” zeitgeist,76 the statue
challengers of 2020 were, in fact, expressing a persistent and growing concern at the
insufficient official recognition of a history of frontier violence and genocidal colonization.

Stirling’s statue, the Pinjarra Massacre Memorial, and public memory

One of the obstacles to resolving conflict over the Stirling statue has been the profound
disagreement about what had happened at Pinjarra and therefore how both Governor
Stirling and those killed ought to be remembered. Stirling and other eyewitnesses initially
described the Pinjarra massacre as a “skirmish,” a “rencontre,” an “encounter,” a
74
Bronwyn Pearce, “Stirling Statue Found,” West Australian, 2 November 2002, Malcolm Queckett, “City Plan for Stirling
site still in limbo,” West Australian, 25 May 2015, and “No to Stirling offer for Stirling statue,” Guardian Express, 7 July
2015.
75
Kate Campbell, “Calls for statues of key figures in WA history to be removed,” Perth Now, 27 August 2017. See also
“Stirling statue protest,” Fremantle Herald Interactive, 27 October 2017.
76
Grovier, “Black Lives Matter Protests.”
 JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 525

“chastisement,” and an “affray,” but the term “the Battle of Pinjarra,” which appears to
have been coined by Stirling himself, was soon adopted.77 It was used two years after
the event by the colony’s interpreter, Francis Armstrong, when describing a throwing
stick decorated by a Bindjareb artist. It depicted, he said, the “battle of Pinjarra” in a
drawing of a river along whose banks were the “outlines of human and horses’ feet,
and the graves of the slain.”78 Naming the event as a battle fostered an image of two
equal sides at war, and for a century and a half it was widely known as such. It would
take time for massacre, a politically charged term that derives etymologically from the
Old French for “butchery” or “slaughterhouse” and that draws attention to the cold-
blooded exertion of power, to be accepted in relation to Pinjarra.
A push within the Murray Shire in which Pinjarra is located for a formal memorial to the
victims began in the 1970s, when the Federal government finally began taking heed of
Indigenous calls for self-determination. As Noongar elders note, it was not until this
time that they felt sufficiently empowered to voice their interests without “fear of jeopar-
dizing their jobs and personal safety.”79 Shortly after the establishment of the Murray Dis-
tricts Aboriginal Association (MDAA) in 1973, a wooden plaque was placed on a large
jarrah tree as the first memorial. By 1985 it had been destroyed in a bushfire, so the
MDAA, led firstly by President Oscar Little and later by coordinator Theo Kearing,
began campaigning for a more enduring monument.
They did so in a context where public understanding was beginning to shift towards
recognizing the Pinjarra event as a massacre. Neville Green’s detailed study in 1984
argued that although it was “glorified as the Battle of Pinjarra,” the “event” was in fact
a massacre.80 Green’s work was part of a wider recognition of the role of massacres in Aus-
tralia’s colonizing history. As genocide scholar Colin Tatz has pointed out, in the 1980s and
1990s, before Australian historians turned to the question of genocide, “the developing
preoccupation was with massacre. Myall Creek, Waterloo Creek, Forrest River, Bathurst,
Orara River, Gippsland, Palmer River, Pinjarra, and Alice Springs became more familiar
as sites of killing.”81 Slowly, during the 1990s public awareness that what happened at Pin-
jarra might be better described as the Pinjarra Massacre grew. For Bindjareb Noongar,
these new studies of Pinjarra reinforced what they already knew.82 Influenced by Green
and by John Mulvaney’s similar account in Encounters in Place, and with the approval
of Bindjareb elders in Pinjarra, Noongar actors and writers Geoff Kelso, Kelton Pell, and
Phil Thomson, began working in the early 1990s on a play about the massacre.83 Bindjareb
Pinjarra was first presented in Perth in September 1994 and was a huge success, per-
formed in regional southwest Australia, including at Pinjarra, and later in other states.84

77
George Fletcher Moore, in his diary entry for 1 November 1834, records Stirling’s own account of what happened, using
the phrase “Battle of Pinjarra”: Diary of ten years eventful life of an early settler in Western Australia, and also A descriptive
vocabulary of the language of the Aborigines (Nedlands: UWA Press, 1978 [1842]), 10. See Statham-Drew, “Stirling and
Pinjarra,” 184.
78
“Manners and Habits of the Aborigines of Western Australia. From information collected by Mr F. Armstrong,
Interpreter,” Perth Gazette, 5 November 1836, 793, cited in Neville Green, “Aborigines and White Settlers in the Nine-
teenth Century,” in A New History of Western Australia, ed. Tom Stannage (Nedlands: UWA Press, 1981), 86.
79
Contos et al, Pinjarra Massacre Site, 66.
80
Green, Broken Spears, 99, 105
81
Colin Tatz, “Confronting Australian Genocide,” Aboriginal History 25 (2001): 18.
82
See Anna Haebich, Dancing in Shadows: Histories of Nyungar Performance (Perth: UWA Publishing, 2018) 56.
83
Mulvaney, Encounters in Place, 168–71. See also Lois Tilbrook, Nyungar tradition: glimpses of Aborigines of South-
Western Australia 1829–1914 (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1983).
84
Haebich, Dancing in Shadows, 275–99.
526 A. CURTHOYS AND S. KONISHI

Even as public understanding began to shift, recognition of the events as a massacre

continued to be highly contested, with serious consequences for the memorialization of
its victims. An opportunity to gain funding soon arose as part of Australia’s Bicentenary
commemoration, but was missed when the Murray Shire Council refused to provide
essential support.85 When the Australian Heritage Commission took steps to enter the
site of the massacre on the Register of the National Estate, some members of the
council protested. Eventually, a compromise was reached, and the Pinjarra Battle Memor-
ial Area was registered in June 1992.86 But resistance to the term massacre remained in
December 1998, when the Murray Shire council refused to formally recognise the word
“massacre.”87
In 2001, after a ten-year campaign, a permanent memorial was finally erected on the
site. This was a large boulder surrounded by a circular paved area with mosaic medallions
depicting black and white figures and handprints. The conflict over nomenclature,
however, meant there was no inscription explaining what was being memorialized. As
Jennifer Harris comments, the absence of any explanatory sign made “the site mysterious
and incomplete” so that it became a place of double trauma, not only for the descendants
of the massacre but also for the non-Indigenous population for whom it means “having to
contemplate the revision of their history and of all of the values associated with it.” The
struggle over naming continued. In 2007 the Shire of Murray installed a plaque on the
memorial commemorating the Battle of Pinjarra, a move criticized by the WA Heritage
Council which recognized it as a massacre; it seems that a member of the public
agreed with the Council, for the plaque soon disappeared.88 On the massacre’s 176th
anniversary in 2010, after a long campaign by Binjareb representative Kerrie-Anne
Kearing-Salmon, the WA Police Service erected a new plaque as “an act of reconciliation.”
It omitted both contentious words and instead commemorated the “memory of the men,
women and children of the Bindjareb Noongar people and a Colonial Officer” who died
“as part of confrontations in the early days of the Swan River Colony.” Illustrating the
ongoing tensions concerning how the memorial should be framed, this plaque too was
stolen.89 When it was eventually replaced, the text remained the same, but was now in
both Noongar and English (see Figure 4a and b).
Since 2007 the “Pinjarra Massacre Site” has been listed on the Heritage Council of
Western Australia’s heritage register. In November 2018, after decades of opposition,
the Shire of Murray council finally acceded to defining the 1834 events as a massacre
and voted in favour of providing in-principle support for a new memorial which, as we
write, is still in the early stages of planning.90 The implications of this formal recognition
of the Pinjarra massacre for the Stirling Statue, which still sits outside the City of Perth
Library, remain to be seen.

85
Contos et al, Pinjarra Massacre Site, 114 and Harris, “Memorials and Trauma,” 48.
86
Fay Gale, Shared Space – Divided Cultures: Australia Today, Cunningham Lecture (Canberra: Academic of Social Sciences,
1998), 4.
87
Harris, “Memorials and Trauma,” 49.
88
Harris, “Memorials and Trauma,” 48–9.
89
“Memorial plaque stolen after a month,” Weekend Courier, 3 December 2010.
90
The Pinjarra massacre is also listed on the University of Newcastle’s Colonial Frontier Massacre Map. “Pinjarra,” Colonial
Frontier Massacres, Australia, 1780 to 1930, https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/detail.php?r=887
(accessed 21 May 2021).
 JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 527

Figure 4. (a and b) Pinjarra Massacre Memorial. Credit: authors.

Conclusion
For genocide and massacre studies, the debates over the Stirling statue are significant for
drawing attention to a massacre that provides us with unusually explicit statements of the
aims of the perpetrators. The question of intent has been a difficult one for historians of
massacre and genocide, in part because of difficulties in ascribing intention to what some
suggest is best understood as a “structure of power” and in part because perpetrators
rarely provide clear documentary evidence of their genocidal intentions.91 In the case
of the Pinjarra massacre, however, we have unusually clear expressions of genocidal
intent by the perpetrators – the reports that Stirling’s party considered punishment to
have been “sufficiently exemplary” and that surviving Bindjareb women were warned
any retaliation would be met by a military expedition determined to “destroy every
man, woman and child” are unusually clear statements of genocidal intention.92 That
this genocidal action was led by a governor representing British imperial power in the
colonies makes it all the more striking.
It is time for Stirling’s statue to be removed, as so many other statues around the world
have been both now and in the past. It is time, also, for full acknowledgement of the gen-
ocidal dimension of the Pinjarra massacre and, most importantly of all, for proper mem-
orialization of its victims.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

91
Jacques Semelin, “Towards a vocabulary of massacre and genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 5, no. 2 (2003): 193–
210, esp. 198.
92
Anon, “Encounter with the Natives in the Pinjarra District,” 383.
528 A. CURTHOYS AND S. KONISHI

Notes on contributors
Ann Curthoys is Professor Emerita at the Australian National University and an honorary professor at
the University of Western Australia. She writes about many aspects of Australian history including
Indigenous history, and about genocide theory and historical writing. Her most recent book, co-
authored with Jessie Mitchell, is Taking Liberty: Indigenous Rights and Settler Self-Government in
the Australian Colonies, 1830–1890 (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She lives in Sydney on
Gadigal land.
Shino Konishi is an Associate Professor in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the Aus-
tralian Catholic University. Her research examines Indigenous and early colonial history, and her
publications include The Aboriginal Male in the Enlightenment World (2012), and the edited collec-
tions Indigenous Intermediaries: New Perspectives on Exploration Archives (2015) and Brokers and
Boundaries: Colonial Exploration in Indigenous Territory (2016). She descends from the Yawuru
people of Broome, Western Australia, and lives on Whadjuk Noongar Country.

ORCID
Shino Konishi http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2771-9555