Differing Views From Historians
In more recent times historians have differed on the site of the collision and the number of casualties.
Historian RHW Reece concluded that the site was at the junction of the Slaughterhouse Creek and the Gwydir River, and that sixty or seventy Aborigines had been killed.
Military historian Peter Stanley claims at least fifty Aborigines were killed.
Historian Lyndall Ryan considered that Sergeant Lee's estimate of 40 to 50 killed was the most reliable.
Keith Windschuttle contends that what occurred at Waterloo Creek was a legitimate police action in which at most three to four Aborigines were killed in the second encounter.
Read more about this topic: Waterloo Creek Massacre
Famous quotes containing the words differing, views and/or historians:
“The spirit of the place is a strange thing. Our mechanical age tries to override it. But it does not succeed. In the end the strange, sinister spirit of the place, so diverse and adverse in differing places, will smash our mechanical oneness into smithereens.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.”
—Margaret Atwood (b. 1939)