Cape Grim massacre

The Cape Grim massacre was an incident on 10 February 1828 in which a group of Aboriginal Tasmanians gathering food at a beach in the north-west of Tasmania is said to have been ambushed and shot by four Van Diemen's Land Company (VDLC) workers, with bodies of some of the victims then thrown from a 60-metre cliff. About 30 men are thought to have been killed in the attack, which was a reprisal action for an earlier Aboriginal raid on a flock of Van Diemen's Land Company sheep, but part of an escalating spiral of violence probably triggered by the abduction and rape of Aboriginal women in the area. The massacre was part of the "Black War", the period of violent conflict between British colonists and Aboriginal Australians in Tasmania from the mid-1820s to 1832.

News of the Cape Grim killings did not reach Governor George Arthur for almost two years. Arthur sent George Augustus Robinson, who held an unofficial government role as an Aboriginal conciliator, to investigate the incident, and later statements from company workers, a diary entry by the wife of a ship's captain and the testimony of an Aboriginal woman provided some further information. Despite the witness statements however, detail of what took place is sketchy and Australian author Keith Windschuttle and some other historians have subsequently disputed the magnitude of the massacre or denied it occurred at all.

The site of the massacre has been identified as the present-day Suicide Bay, facing the island outcrops known as The Doughboys. Because a number of tribes were in the area at the time, it is uncertain which one was involved in the clash, although historian Lyndall Ryan states that those killed were members of the Peerapper clan.

Clans of the North West nation had experienced violent conflict with European settlers since 1810 when sealing parties abducted women. In 1820 a group of sealers sprang from hiding in a cave at The Doughboys near Cape Grim and ambushed a group of Pennemukeer women collecting muttonbirds and shellfish, capturing and binding them and carrying them off to Kangaroo Island. Pennemukeer men responded with a reprisal attack, clubbing three sealers to death.

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