Australia must confront bloody colonial past

A landowner of an Indigenous massacre site is urging Australia to investigate and confront its colonial past. Elizabeth Balderstone lives a short walk from a water bank where scores of Gunaikurnai people were murdered by settlers in eastern Victoria's Gippsland in 1846. The massacre was in apparent retribution for the killing of Ronald Macalister, a nephew of wealthy NSW pastoralist Lachlan McAllister. The Yoorrook Justice Commission is hearing evidence from non-Indigenous witnesses with links to key events in Victoria's colonial history. "After Ronald's murder, a group of settlers came together and came upon a large group of Brataualung people camped at the waterhole at Warrigal Creek," Ms Balderstone told the truth-telling inquiry on Wednesday. Angus McMillan and about 20 settlers, dubbed the Highland Brigade, went on a five-day spree killing upwards of 150 Indigenous men, women and children across four locations. With the encouragement and consultation with local Indigenous elders, Ms Balderstone has fenced off parts of her property for native revegetation and to preserve the site. "They expressed a gratefulness that we're looking after it gently and quietly and protecting the site, and are willing to invite people there and to talk about it," she said. The site is visited by Indigenous Australians and occasionally by school groups. "I'm still very aware at the end of the day, I'm still a property owner and living on unceded land ... but I also sense we've got to meet together on some of it, and you know that there is a mutual respect," Ms Balderstone said. While the massacre was no secret when she first moved to the area permanently in 1980, she found there was resistance to confronting its history in the largely-conservative region of Gippsland. "Unless Australia as a whole confronts this past and shares ... what happened in those early years, we're never going to go forward as a nation in partnership with our First Nations people," Ms Balderstone said. A descendant of former prime minster Alfred Deakin, Peter Sharp, also gave evidence to the commission on Wednesday. Deakin, Australia's second prime minister, sponsored the Aboriginal Protection Amendment Act, also known as the "half caste" act, which formed legal groundwork for the stolen generation. Mr Sharp had thoroughly researched the former PM, known as "affable Alfred", who was also the architect of the White Australia policy. "There's other pieces in his writing which reveal beneath this affable appearance, he was prepared to be absolutely ruthless, and especially if he could get away with it," Mr Sharp told the inquiry. "And you have to accept that he grew up with this vision before him, that this land was going to be occupied solely by the invading race." Mr Sharp said he had been shocked by his research. "I thought my family all just came in the gold rush, (that) they weren't part of the frontier massacres," he said. "All the books I'd read had said that Deakin was a supporter of Aboriginal rights." Mr Sharp said he hoped his contribution would help dispel the myth that the stolen generation came about through well-meaning but mismanaged policy. "The 1886 Act ... its intention was the total elimination of Aboriginal culture and population," he said.