Cape Grim Massacre - Massacre

Massacre

According to a report by George Augustus Robinson, on 10 February 1828, four shepherds ambushed the Pennemukeer Aborigines from Cape Grim while they were muttonbirding, killing 30 people. First the shepherds fired upon the families camped on the beach, and then drove those who sought shelter in the rocks up the hill where they were massacred before the shepherds dumped the bodies over the cliff at Suicide Bay—the same cliff that the sheep had been driven over. The shepherds then called this Victory Hill. The Aborigines that escaped the massacre called the white settlers at Cape Grim the nowhummoe or devils and avoided Cape Grim but occasionally plundered isolated huts for provisions.

George Augustus Robinson investigated the massacre two years later and gave this account:

On the occasion of the massacre a tribe of natives, consisting of women and children, had come to the islands. Providence had favoured them with fine weather ... They swam across, leaving their children at the rocks in the care of the elderly people. They had prepared their supply of birds, had tied them with grass, had towed them on shore, and the whole tribe was seated round their fires partaking of their hard-earned fare, when down rushed the band of fierce barbarians thirsting for the blood of these unprotected and unoffending people. They fled, leaving their provision. Some rushed into the sea, others scrambled around the cliff and what remained the monsters put to death. Those poor creatures who had sought shelter in the cleft of the rock they forced to the brink of an awful precipice, massacred them all and threw their bodies down the precipice ... I went to the foot of the cliff where the bodies had been thrown down and saw several human bones, some of which I brought with me, and a piece of the bloody cliff. As the tide was flowing I hastened from this Golgotha.