Caledon Bay crisis

The Caledon Bay crisis refers to a series of killings at Caledon Bay in the Northern Territory of Australia during 1932–34. These events are widely seen as a turning point in relations between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.

In 1932, five Japanese trepang fishers were killed by Aboriginals in the Caledon Bay area of northeast Arnhem Land. In another incident on Woodah Island, two white men named Fagan and Traynor were killed. A policeman investigating the deaths, Constable Albert McColl, was subsequently also killed by Yolngu. McColl had handcuffed a Yolngu woman as part of a plan to catch Dhakiyarr (also known as Takiar, Tuckiar and Takiara) but was killed by a spear through the heart while being led by the woman to where she had told him Dhakiyarr was camping.

The killings triggered panic in Darwin, capital of the Northern Territory, generating fears that Aborigines — the majority of the population in the Territory at the time — might stage an uprising. A punitive expedition was proposed by police to "teach the blacks a lesson". (In 1928, during a previous punitive expedition in the Northern Territory, police had killed up to 110 Aboriginal men, women and children; an event known as the Coniston massacre.)

Many feared another such slaughter, and a party from the Church Missionary Society travelled to Arnhem Land and persuaded Dhakiyarr and three other men, who were sons of a Yolngu elder, Wonggu, to return to Darwin with them for trial. In Darwin, to the horror of the missionaries, Dhakiyarr was sentenced to death by hanging, and the three other men were sentenced to twenty years hard labour. On appeal to the High Court of Australia, Dhakiyarr’s sentence was quashed, and he was released from jail, but disappeared. Rumours suggested he had been killed by police.

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