Interview with Chris Owen - Mapping Massacres

High school curricula around the country today engage in a degree of Truth Telling, and teach non indigenous kids what their parents and grandparents often only heard hinted at – that First Nations peoples around Australia’s frontiers were often mercilessly killed at the hands of European settlers as the country was ‘opened up’ following British colonisation.

The 1834 so called ‘Battle of Pinjarra’, more accurately the ‘Pinjarra Massacre’, on the Murray River around 80 kilometres/50miles south of Fremantle, is a case in point. The stories were the same from all frontier parts as Australia was opened up to European settlement. In the 1890s the stories from the Kimberley region of WA echoed that of Pinjarra. The Kimberley stories are told in Dr Chris Owen’s much praised book, ‘Every Mother’s Son Is Guilty’: Policing the Kimberley Frontier of Western Australia 1882-1905’, published by UWA Press.

Dr Chris Owen kindly agreed to sit and discuss the topic of frontier killings with our editor, Michael Barker, who in an earlier life was the barrister who appeared for the Miriuwung people of the East Kimberley on their ground breaking, successful application for native title in the Federal Court of Australia in the late 1990s.

You can read the full story Fremantle Shipping News here.