In August 1928, a dingo trapper named Fred Brooks was killed near a waterhole called Yurrkuru in the Tanami Desert, after breaking Warlpiri marriage law. What followed was ten weeks of killing carried out by a police constable and his posse, sweeping across Warlpiri, Anmatyerre, and Kaytetye Country with no real attempt to distinguish the people involved in Brooks's death from anyone who simply happened to be nearby. To this day, nobody agrees on how many people died, with estimates ranging from the official count of thirty one to oral histories putting the number closer to two hundred.

This episode covers the Coniston Massacre, often called the last known officially sanctioned massacre of Aboriginal people in Australian history. We trace how a single phone call gave one constable a free hand to punish an entire community, how a government inquiry concluded the killings were self defence, and why this event, well within living memory, is only now starting to find a place in how Australia remembers its frontier history, including an upcoming Frontier Wars gallery at the Australian War Memorial.

Content warning: this episode includes detailed historical accounts of mass killing, including the deaths of women and children. If anything raises something for you, 13YARN (13 92 76) is a 24/7 crisis line staffed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.