In the 1820s, a girl named Truganini lost her mother to whalers, her uncle to soldiers, and her sister to sealers, all before she'd finished growing up. It was the world the Black War created on the island now called Tasmania, lutruwita, a conflict that killed an estimated sixty percent of the entire Aboriginal population within less than a decade and remains one of the most intense, sustained colonial conflicts in this country's history.

This episode covers how the war escalated from isolated violence to martial law and the Black Line, the largest domestic military operation ever mounted on Australian soil. We follow Truganini's complicated path through it, as negotiator, survivor, and eventually the woman colonial authorities falsely declared the last of an extinct people. We also look at what happened to her remains after death, how the palawa community survived and rebuilt their language against every official prediction, and where the fight for a Treaty in Tasmania stands right now, in 2026.

Content warning: this episode covers an extended period of historical violence, including widespread killing, sexual violence against women, and the deaths of children. It also discusses the exhumation and display of human remains. If anything raises something for you, 13YARN (13 92 76) is a 24/7 crisis line staffed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

On 10 June 1838, a group of armed men rode onto a station in northern New South Wales and killed at least twenty eight Wirrayaraay people, men, women, and children, then burned the bodies two days later to destroy the evidence. What happened next set this massacre apart from hundreds of others across colonial Australia: a station manager reported it, a Governor ordered an investigation, and seven men were eventually hanged for it, the only time in this country's colonial history that white men were executed for killing Aboriginal people.

This episode walks through how the Myall Creek massacre unfolded, why the first trial ended in a not guilty verdict in fifteen minutes, and how one Attorney General's decision to pursue a second trial changed the outcome. We also look at what happened to the men involved afterward, including the leader who was never caught, and how this single, partial moment of accountability did nothing to stop the broader pattern of frontier violence across the continent, a pattern researchers are still mapping today.

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

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.