How an awkward conversation over Christmas lunch unlocked a family's dark colonial legacy

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In a search for answers about his family history, Sam Carmody hears stories so disturbing that they have implications for an entire region, where his ancestors have a statue, a highway and even a town named after them.

He had first researched this history of violence in the South West in the early 1990s. He warns me of what I might find.

"I think there's nothing to be scared of to have the conversation, and if people want to sit down and talk, great. Just keep talking." "And she said, 'Well, you know. There were some shootings down there at that time and it's a patchy history, but it's there', and so I thought, 'Oh, God. OK'."Today, there is no plaque, no sign, no obvious recognition of violence in the area.Unpacking the past

"I don't think it's too much to expect that colonisers do the same thing, make the effort to find out what's in their past.Proud settler talesJohn Garrett Bussell was an unlikely pioneer. He was short and bookish. He was a poet. When he was young he studied at Oxford. He was planning on becoming an Anglican priest.But instead his family fell on hard times after the death of his father, and in 1829 Bussell was sent to Australia along with his three younger brothers.

"[The Wadandi] were seeing the white settlers kill all the kangaroos and all their food sources, so Noongar would kill or take their sheep, which would just absolutely enrage the settlers, because it was extraordinarily difficult to get livestock into the South West and keep breeding them." "The spearing of a neighbour, George Layman, by the chief, Gayware, in 1841 brought a serious clash between settlers and natives, resulting in the death of the murderer and arrest of his sons, and finally bringing peace."However you might describe what occurred, in the aftermath an eerie silence settled on the South West."No further trouble took place for the remainder of the year of 1841.

Jessica stumbled across this same violent history after years of researching another settler family in the area, the Molloys. After an initial clash between the settlers and Wadandi, Gayware is later found and reportedly shot dead. "There was now no escape for the fugitives, and their vacuous cries of terror mingled with the reports of the white men's guns.

 

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