The 170th anniversary of the Myall Creek Massacre memorial service was held over the weekend and it got me thinking how far this country has come in the last century, some of the progress able to be tracked back to this horrific event.

I was first made aware of the Myall Creek Massacre’s significance to Australian history when I was a high school student in Inverell and in a moment of boredom flicked to the back index of my history textbook to see if Inverell was in there.

Much to my surprise it was, under the entry for the Myall Creek Massacre.

It was then I started to realise how big this event was, something that was made more evident to me as we studied it further later in the year.

This was the first and only time the Colonial Administration stepped in to prosecute white settlers who slaughtered Aboriginal people for camping on their native lands.

Let’s stop and think about that for a minute.

The Colonial Administration of the time actually ordered settlers to defend themselves against Aboriginal people who were simply staying where they had lived for hundreds upon thousands of years and it wasn’t long before settlers took matters into their own hands.

The 30 Wirrayaraay people who were killed on that day were tied together and murdered, men, women, children and the elderly.

The perpetrators of this crime came back two days later to burn their evidence.

We have an unnamed station hand to thank for bringing these people to justice, reporting them to the authorities in a time when such behaviour was sadly seen as par for the course.

I suppose this is the lesson we have to learn from the Myall Creek Massacre, it can take the actions of one brave person to change history, all we have to do is keep the momentum going and never let young Australians forget their sometimes brutal history if we are to forge new relationships and heal old wounds.