The Avenue Range Station massacre was a murder of a group of Aboriginal Australians by white settlers during the Australian frontier wars. It occurred in about September 1848 at Avenue Range, a sheep station in the southeast of the Colony of South Australia.
Information is scarce about the basic facts of the massacre, including the exact date and number of victims. A contemporary account of the massacre listed nine victims – three women, two teenage girls, three infants, and an "old man blind and infirm". Another account published by Christina Smith in 1880 gave the number of victims as eleven, and specified that they belonged to the Tanganekald people. Pastoralist James Brown and his overseer, a man named Eastwood, were suspected of committing the murders in retaliation for attacks on Brown's sheep.
In January 1849, reports of the massacre reached Matthew Moorhouse, the Protector of Aborigines. He visited the district to investigate the claims, and based on his enquiries Brown was charged with the murders in March 1849. Proceedings against Brown began in June 1849 and continued in the Supreme Court of South Australia for several months, but were eventually abandoned. Some key witnesses, including Eastwood, either fled the colony or refused to cooperate with the investigation. There were also significant restrictions on the use of evidence given by Aboriginal witnesses, especially where a verdict could involve capital punishment. These legal hurdles and settler solidarity ensured the case did not go to trial, although the magistrate who committed him for trial told a friend that there was "little question of the butchery or the butcher".
Although the details of the case were known for decades after the murders, distortions of the massacre eventually appeared in print and were embellished by local white and Aboriginal historians. Two key aspects of these later accounts were that Brown poisoned rather than shot the victims, and that he had undertaken an epic horse ride to Adelaide to establish an alibi. Historians Robert Foster, Rick Hosking and Amanda Nettelbeck contend that these "pioneer legend" alterations downplayed the seriousness of the crime.
Background
The colony of South Australia was established by white settlers in December 1836. In early 1839, settlers began spreading out from the capital, Adelaide. That May, James Brown and his brother Archibald arrived in the colony from Scotland. The following year, they took up a property in the Encounter Bay district about south of the capital. James then branched off on his own and established Avenue Range, a pastoral run in the Guichen Bay district, about southeast of Adelaide.
In common with other areas of Australia, settlers on the frontier in southeast South Australia employed various tactics to deal with Aboriginal resistance to being forced off their land. Initially, settlers attempted to keep them at a distance using threats of violence, but they soon escalated to using actual violence, hoping that by terrorising them they could prevent them from interfering with stock and other property. Violence by settlers towards Aboriginal people often went unreported to the authorities, and became more secretive after a settler was hanged in March 1847 for the murder of an Aboriginal man in the colony's southeast – the only such sentence carried out in the history of South Australia's early white settlement. This undeclared and covert fighting between settlers and Aboriginal people in South Australia is considered part of the Australian frontier wars.
Massacre, investigation and legal proceedings
Reports were received by the colonial authorities in January 1849 that some Aboriginal people had been killed near Guichen Bay. On 19 February, the Protector of Aborigines, Matthew Moorhouse, arrived in the district to investigate. Moorhouse's role was to safeguard the rights and interests of Aboriginal people within the colony. He began his inquiries assisted by a mounted policeman, an interpreter, and an Aboriginal guide. An Aboriginal witness, Leandermin, took Moorhouse to the site of the alleged crime. He told Moorhouse that, on the day the killings occurred, he and a white man named Parker were walking along a road when they heard shots. He went to see what was happening and, from behind some trees, saw four or five Aboriginal women lying on the ground with fresh wounds. He also saw others on the ground, whom he presumed were dead because they were not moving. Two white men were present. Leandermin identified Brown as one of them, and stated that Brown had a gun in his hand. Brown's overseer, Eastwood, was suspected of being his accomplice.