Article by John Jiggens, first published on Independent Australia, 16 July 2025; republished under Creative Commons.
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On its 25th anniversary, the Myall Creek Memorial stands as a quiet rebuke to the national silence surrounding Australia’s Frontier Wars, writes Dr John Jiggens.
ON A COLD, blustery Sunday morning, 8 June, the annual commemoration of the Myall Creek massacre began on a field outside the Myall Creek Memorial Hall. The coordinator of the Friends of Myall Creek (Sydney Branch), Graham Cordiner, reminded the attendees that the first meeting of the Myall Creek Memorial group in 1998 was held in the Memorial Hall behind him.
Pointing to the hall, he said:
This is a memorial hall for the soldiers killed in the wars. And we honour that. We honour that. And their day is Anzac Day.
But today is another day, and we're honouring another war, the Frontier Wars. And if you look at it this way, we're going from this place down here, this world, and we're marching up the hill to another world, different to my own. And we're entering another space, a much bigger space.
By this act of remembering the fallen of Myall Creek, the 28 women, children and old men murdered in the massacre, we were entering into our true greatness as a nation, Mr Cordiner said. That four local mayors were walking with the memorial group, and that the Gwyder Shire Council worked together with the community, helping create this monument and this event was greatness, he said.
Cordiner continued:
Today, Myall Creek is a place of peace. At one time, Aboriginal people wouldn't come here because of the trauma associated with the site. But now, Aunt Sue, who is our senior Elder of Myall Creek, her niece on national television said when the interviewer asked her to summarise Myall Creek, she said, ‘It's a place of love’. And when you think of the context of that, she's right. It's true.
As we departed on the two-kilometre walk to the nearby memorial site, Cordiner asked the crowd to regard the walk as a pilgrimage. And so, amidst the raucous screeching of a flock of cockatoos, our Myall Creek pilgrimage began.
What was done to the Indigenous people by British settlers, the destruction, the desolation, has been hidden from history. In 1968, anthropologist WEH Stanner talked about the “cult of forgetfulness”. Australia not only failed to acknowledge the atrocities of the past, but chose not to think about them, to the point of forgetting that these events ever happened. It produced what Stanner called “the Great Australian Silence”.
As an example of the Great Australian Silence and the cult of forgetting, consider the Australian War Memorial. For decades, the exclusion of the Frontier Wars – the only wars fought in Australia – from our lavishly funded Australian War Memorial was a subject of censure from the critics. Why were the dead in overseas wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and countless other countries in Europe, Africa and Asia remembered when the dead of the wars in Australia were ignored?
In 2024, journalist and author David Marr declared: 'That our War Memorial does not deal with the conquest of this continent is ludicrous'.
Former War Memorial Council Chair, Brendan Nelson, promised in 2022 to provide “a much deeper depiction and presentation of the violence committed against Aboriginal people,” as part of the Museum’s new galleries. This remains a promise unfulfilled. Visit the Australian War Memorial and you will find the Frontier Wars do not exist, their truth shrouded still in the Great Australian Silence.
The Myall Creek Massacre Memorial is such a powerful monument because it addresses the Great Australian Silence, remembering the dismembering of a Goomerai clan in a particular brutal massacre of First Nations people, one among hundreds of massacres that littered the land with bones as the colonial frontier expanded outward from Sydney.
The Memorial consists of an amphitheatre near the carpark, and a 600-metre pathway leading downhill with several oval-shaped rocks containing plaques that tell the story of the massacre. The pathway leads to a massive granite rock, a huge monolith overlooking the massacre site, which features a plaque dedicated to the memory of the murdered Wirrayaraay people, a powerful monument to grieve for a Stone Age people brutally dispatched.
The Myall Creek Memorial was inaugurated in 2000, so the 2025 memorial marked the monument’s 25th anniversary.
At the amphitheatre, Wirrayaraay Elder Susie Blacklock and her niece Paula Hayes delivered the Welcome to Country and celebrated the Memorial’s quarter-century.
Auntie Susie spoke first. She was an important advocate for the monument, believing it important to remember her forbears and to honour their memory. The idea of a monument to the massacre was mooted in 1998 and the monument opened in 2000.
It was an honour, she said, to be here after 25 years since they first gathered in this place on that awful day when her ancestors, descendants of Myall Creek, were slaughtered: 'We are here to celebrate, not to mourn. To celebrate because their spirits have risen. They are no longer bound to the graves where they were.'
Paula Hayes welcomed us to country and asked us to acknowledge those who had fallen, and to thank those who had struggled to erect this monument to remember them:
Our people, our nation and all the people that's been around, that has been badly done by the White generation in the day. But at the end of the day, Aunt Susie, Uncle Mo and the Inverell Elders, and all the people that's been involved in this journey, it's been a very, very hard journey for them to get to where this second stage is today. They have put a lot of work into it, the committee, the workers and as you look around, it's improving every year.
And it's immaculate to drive in and see all this. Because when my dad brought me up here, it was only a goat track. It was just all scrub and a goat track. And it's been a long, long journey, especially for the hard fight of the committee.
All the people that have travelled for a long way, you know, you've come and seen something that's never been done before here in this area. And we're very proud of it. I am very proud of it. I'm proud of Keith and Aunt Susie. Uncle Mo, the committee, to see the dancing and who came and are here today, it is great to see.
We then observed a minute's silence for the family members who were needlessly and violently massacred on the evening of 10 June 1838.
The Myall Creek Massacre Memorial is west of Inverell in NSW on the road between Warialda and Bingara. It honours the native people who fought to defend their country.
The author is a writer and journalist currently working in the community newsroom of Bay-FM, Byron Bay
Picture credit: The Myall Creek Memorial site (Tracy Appel/Wikimedia Commons)
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