I whakaputahia tuatahia tēnei atikara e NITV i Ahitereiria.
Warning: this article describes historical atrocities and may be distressing to some readers.
192 years ago, a state governor led a massacre of at least 15 Aboriginal people – many other accounts say it was a slaughter of as many as 80 men, women, and children.
By any account, it was one of the bloodiest events in Western Australian history.
Last Wednesday was the 192nd anniversary of the Pinjarra Massacre.
In October 1834, an armed party of 25 people (soldiers, police and settlers), led by then-state governor Captain James Stirling, ambushed a group of Bindjareb Noongar people.
Stirling’s party had travelled to the Aboriginal settlement at Pinjarra - some 80 kilometres south of the Swan River settlement - with the intention of punishing the Bindjareb Noongar people.
There had been conflict over land, food sources and livestock between white settlers and Aboriginal people.
Stirling’s plan was to punish any Aboriginal in the local area in an effort to drive home the message that the settlers and their cattle must not be attacked or killed.
The Perth Gazette in 1834 called the attack an “affray”: it was a “successful and decisive encounter with the Natives of the Murray,” where the firing did not stop “until between 25 and 30 were left dead on the fields and in the river”.
An 1868 account, attributed to Corporal Haggarty of the 63rd Regiment, called it the “indiscriminate slaughter of a harmless and unoffending tribe” where “200 to 300 peaceable natives [were] deliberately shot down”.
Haggarty stated that Governor Stirling gave the Noongar people “no quarter”. He recounted serving as an orderly at Government House when Stirling allegedly ordered him to “take a party of soldiers and go out and shoot some natives.”
A later report in 1927, in the Royal Western Australian Historical Society’s journal told of “About 80 blacks killed and the bodies of many of the dead floating down the river … about 50 natives were buried in one great hole.”
Upon learning of the killings, Lord Glenelg, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies (1835–1839) in London suggested that the attack was more ‘a form of warfare’ than enforcement of British law.
Lord Glenelg pointed out to Sterling that Aboriginal people were British subjects and thus protected under the law.
Ironically, one of Stirling’s first acts as governor was to highlight Aboriginal people’s right to protection under the British Law, in a Proclamation dated 18th June 1829:
‘I do hereby give notice that if any Person or Persons shall be convicted of behaving in a fraudulent, cruel or felonious manner towards the Aborigines of the country, such person or persons will be liable to be prosecuted and tried for the offence.’
In October 2025, Western Australia’s current governor Chris Dawson apologised to the Binjareb/Pindjarup Noongar people for Stirling’s “dreadful wrongs”.
“I come here with my heart and my conscience to say sorry for the dreadful wrongs perpetrated by the first Governor of Western Australia against the Bindjareb Noongar people,” Governor Dawson said in 2025.
“I am deeply sorry for the actions of my predecessor and for the pain and suffering he caused,” Dawson told the sombre crowd.
“I say sorry to the Bindjareb people, who still feel the trauma of the punishment inflicted on their ancestors that day, when so many innocent lives were taken.”
A number of landmarks in Western Australia are named after Stirling - the man behind the one of the bloodiest events in WA and our nation’s history.
Nā John Paul Janke nō NITV.
