Myall Creek Memorial

Written by Graham Wilson

Myall Creek Memorial; Community Reconciliation Project; Whitlow Road.

On 10 June 2000, the Myall Creek Memorial Site was dedicated.  It stands on Whitlow Road off the Bingara Delungra Road overlooking the Myall Creek homestead.  The memorial is set on a rise overlooking the massacre site.  A 600-metre path meanders through natural timber and grasses leading to a very large memorial rock.  Along the path are seven smaller granite rocks on which are etchings drawn by Cohn Isaacs and words in English and Gamilaroi which tell the story of the massacre.  On the large memorial rock the plaque states:

In memory of the Wirrayaraay people who were murdered on the slopes of this ridge in an unprovoked but premeditated act in the late afternoon of 10 June 1838.  Erected on 10 June 2000 by a group of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians in an act of reconciliation, and in acknowledgement of the truth of our shared history.  We remember them.  Ngiyni winangay ganunga. 

On the day of the dedication, ‘descendants of those who were murdered, and descendants of those who carried out the massacre came together in an act of personal reconciliation, as depicted in an episode of An Australian Story on ABC Television’.  The memorial won the inaugural ANTaR Innovative Reconciliation Prize in 2005.  This prize was established as a partnership between ANTaR and the Two Fires Festival held at Braidwood, NSW.

A further plaque is dedicated in ‘honoured memory of Len Payne, of Bingara, 26 January 1909-29 October 1994, who for may years fought to have a memorial erected to commemorate the massacre.  His efforts inspired the work of the committee’.