AustLit

'Coniston, written for a popular audience, is a compelling read. The prologue portrays Central Australia during the 1920s as an alien environment for settlers, who were at the mercy of marauding Aborigines. The racial violence, exacerbated by drought, is said to have exploded with the so-called ‘Warramulla invasion’ that saw Aboriginal people kill Fred Brooks on Coniston Station, then attack other white men camped along the Lander River. Subsequently, Mounted Constable George Murray was appointed to investigate these attacks, which led to a series of expeditions that resulted in the killing of numbers of Aboriginal people. These events are now referred to as ‘the Coniston massacre’. An official inquiry into the slayings resulted in the finding that Murray and his men shot thirty-one Aboriginal people in self-defence. Noting that the war of the Warramullas was ‘a figment of a fevered white imagination’ (4), the author, Michael Bradley, is interested in getting to the truth of the situation: ‘why it happened’ and ‘how many died’. He asks, furthermore, why Coniston ‘is not part of the conversation’ about ‘Australia's graphic history of war and large-scale death’ (5).' (Introduction)