Coniston Massacre - Board of Inquiry

Board of Inquiry

The Board of Inquiry was presided over by police magistrate A.H. O'Kelly and was deeply compromised from the start – its three members being hand-picked to maximise damage control; J.C. Cawood, Government Resident in Central Australia, and Murray’s immediate superior, being one of them. Cawood revealed his own disposition in a letter to his departmental secretary shortly after the massacre: “…trouble has been brewing for some time, and the safety of the white man could only be assured by drastic action on the part of the authorities … I am firmly of the opinion that the result of the recent action by the police will have the right effect upon the natives.”

The Board sat for 18 days in January 1929 to consider three incidents (Brooks, Morton and Tilmouth) that resulted in the deaths of Aborigines, and in one more day, finished its report, finding that 31 Aborigines had been killed and that in each case the death was justified.

The hearing decided, in the face of indubitable evidence to the contrary, that there had been no drought in Central Australia, evidence of ample native food and water supplies and thus no mitigation for cattle spearing. A journalist for the Adelaide Register-News who travelled with the board during its tour of Central Australia to determine the claims of drought reported; "Five years of drought have burnt every blade of grass from the plains and left a wilderness of red sand...the wonder is that any living thing survives. Every settler visited by the Board had lost between 60 to 80 percent of his stock this year alone." The day after this report was published, a settler replied in the letters to the editor that the drought made the life of one ewe worth more to Australia than "all the blacks that were ever here".

Cawood expressed his satisfaction with the outcome in his annual report for 1929, writing: “The evidence of all the witnesses was conclusive … the Board found that the shooting was justified, and that the natives killed were all members of the Walmulla (sic) tribe from Western Australia, who were on a marauding expedition, with the avowed object of wiping out the white settlers…”

Following his appointment, O'Kelly had stated his intention that the enquiry would not be a whitewash and it is speculated he had been "got at." To take up his appointment, O'Kelly travelled by train from Canberra to Melbourne with Prime Minister Stanley Bruce, who was campaigning for the upcoming election with the White Australia policy as his party's main platform, accompanying him. O'Kelly later said that had he known how the enquiry would turn out, he would have refused the appointment, stating that if the same circumstances happened again someone would be hung for the killings.

Reporting on the inquiry, the Adelaide Register-News wrote: "he is the hero of Central Australia. He is the policeman of fiction. He rides alone and always gets his man."