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Around 1924, a group of Gija men were tried in the colonial courts at Wyndham in the East Kimberley for allegedly killing a bullock at Bedford Downs Station. They were found guilty. Then they were sent back to the station with tickets hung around their necks, so the manager would know what they had been convicted of.
Some understood what the tickets might mean and threw them away before they arrived. Others kept them. The men who still had their tickets were taken to a remote location, told to chop wood, and given a meal afterward. The food was heavily laced with strychnine. All the men who ate it died in slow, agonising convulsions. Their bodies were stacked on the wood they had just cut and burned.
Months later, investigators found the cooking pot from the camp. Inside it was kangaroo meat and echidna. There was no bullock. The crime for which these men were convicted, and for which they were murdered, may never have happened at all.
This episode tells the story of the Bedford Downs massacre, one of the clearest examples of what Gija and neighbouring peoples of the East Kimberley call the Killing Times, the period of systematic colonial violence across the region between roughly 1890 and the late 1920s. We talk about why poisoning was such a common method, what the colonial court process actually delivered to the men who went through it, and what it means that the only historical record of what happened at Bedford Downs comes not from any official file but from the oral history of Gija communities and the paintings of Gija artists including Queenie McKenzie, Shirley Purdie, and Timmy Timms, whose work now sits in major Australian collections including the Australian War Memorial.
A colonial legal system that delivered men to their deaths. A cooking pot with no bullock in it. Bodies burned so nothing would remain. And a community that made the record in paint, because no one else was going to make it at all.
This podcast is recorded on Wadjuk Nyoongar Country. We acknowledge the Wadjuk Nyoongar people as the Traditional Custodians of the land this show is made on, and pay our respects to their Elders, past and present.
This is a 3 Brothers Production.
