In early 1839, between forty-five and fifty-two Aboriginal people were camped at a place called Puuroyup, beside a creek in what's now Victoria's Western District. Most of them belonged to the Tarnbeere Gundidj clan of the Djargurd Wurrung nation. It was night. People were asleep.

A station manager named Frederick Taylor led a group of shepherds on horseback into position around the camp in the dark, forming a complete cordon around the sleeping families before anyone inside knew they were there. Then his men opened fire.

The justification? An unverified claim from one of his own shepherds that two unidentified Aboriginal people had killed some sheep. George Robinson, the Chief Protector of Aborigines, reviewed that claim and asked, in writing, whether the shepherd might simply have killed the animals himself and handed the leftovers to local Aboriginal people. Nobody listened. Between thirty-five and forty people were killed anyway.

This episode tells the full story of the Murdering Gully massacre — one of the most thoroughly documented frontier killings in Victorian history, precisely because so many independent sources, survivor testimonies, settler diaries, missionary records, and Aboriginal Protectorate files, all happened to converge on the same sequence of events. We talk about what happened to the bodies, what happened to the Tarnbeere Gundidj clan, and what happened to Frederick Taylor — who fled to India, returned years later, built an entirely new life on Gunai country in Gippsland, and faced exactly one consequence for the rest of his long, comfortable life. Not a trial. Not a conviction. A refused land application.

We also talk about Niel Black, the settler who bought out Taylor's station and recorded in his own diary that taking up new land in this country required a conscience, in his own words, sufficiently seared to slaughter natives right and left — and who positioned himself as more civilised than Taylor simply by purchasing an already-cleared run instead of clearing it himself.

Thirty-five to forty people killed in their sleep. One creek renamed in disapproval. Nobody charged.

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.

Episode 18: The Northern Territory Intervention

In late June 2007, military jeeps rolled into Mutitjulu, a remote community four hundred and sixty kilometres south west of Alice Springs. Residents described never having seen their families so nervous and scared. Some parents genuinely believed the army had come to take their children.

It had been six days since the federal government declared a national emergency in the Northern Territory. Six days since a careful, eight-month inquiry — built on community consultation, genuine research, and ninety-seven specific recommendations — was handed to a Prime Minister who used it to justify something the report's own authors never asked for.

This episode tells the full story of the Northern Territory Intervention — what the Little Children are Sacred report actually said, what the government built on top of it, and why those two things looked so different from each other. We talk about the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act, the welfare quarantining, the compulsory land leases, the abolition of the CDEP program, and the word that doesn't appear once across hundreds of pages of the actual legislation — children. We talk about the Ampilatwatja elders who responded by walking out of their government-provided housing and setting up a bush camp, describing life under the Intervention as feeling exactly like the old welfare days of the sixties and seventies.

We also talk about the change of government that changed almost nothing. The Racial Discrimination Act, left suspended for three more years under Labor. The Stronger Futures extension that kept the core measures running until 2022. And the independent evidence, gathered across more than a decade, that never managed to show the central measures actually did what they were said to be for.

A report that called for community-driven solutions. A response assembled in six days that delivered soldiers instead.

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.

On the 5th of January 1855, a gallows stood built directly onto the Queen Street footpath in front of Brisbane Gaol. As the man climbed the steps to the platform, he called out across the street to the crowd of Aboriginal people gathered on the rise above him. He told them who had betrayed him. He told them to avenge his death.

His name was Dundalli. For more than a decade, he had been the single most significant resistance figure the colonial settlement of Brisbane had ever faced. And what happened on that gallows — the last public execution ever carried out in the history of Queensland — did not go quickly, or cleanly.

This episode tells the full story of Dundalli, a Turrwan — a great leader, educated under his own people's law — who spent fourteen years organising a measured, reciprocal response to the poisonings, shootings, and dispossession already being carried out against his people in the districts north of Brisbane. We talk about the bunya nut country he came from, the deliberate distinction his raids made between targets, the years of protection he received from communities who sheltered him, and the betrayal that finally ended his freedom.

We also talk about the trial — including his reported attempt to bribe the judge with sixpence — and the hangman who made such a mess of the execution that the crowd on Wickham Terrace heard everything.

And we talk about what happened in 2023, when Queensland formally declared the 5th of January Dundalli Remembrance Day as part of its Path to Treaty process — and what happened less than two years later when that entire process was scrapped by an incoming government, and the Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance kept showing up at Post Office Square anyway.

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.

At one in the morning on the 27th of January 1972, four young Aboriginal men got out of a car on the lawn opposite Parliament House in Canberra. They'd just driven down from Redfern in Sydney. Between them, they were carrying a beach umbrella and a handful of placards. They planted the umbrella in the grass, propped up a sign, and called it the Aboriginal Embassy.

More than fifty years later, it's still there. The Aboriginal Tent Embassy is now the longest continuously running site of political protest anywhere in the world.

This episode traces how four men with a beach umbrella became one of the most effective — and most persistently inconvenient — protest movements in Australian history. We talk about the Prime Minister's announcement the night before that sparked the whole thing, the formal list of demands presented to the government six days later that reads, in hindsight, like a blueprint for every land rights argument that followed, and the July 1972 police crackdown that tore the embassy down, only for a court to rule the removal had been unlawful, only for the government to rush through new legislation the very next day to make it legal retroactively.

We also talk about how a storm, multiple evictions, and a change of government couldn't kill it. How a Prime Minister's lost shoe made international headlines. How an act of arson by a sovereign citizens group in 2022 was condemned by the same Ngunnawal elder who'd been at the founding fifty years earlier. And how, after more than five decades, most of the original 1972 demands remain entirely unmet.

A beach umbrella that became the world's longest running political protest. Still on the same lawn. Still waiting.

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.

On the 17th of October 1861, nineteen settlers were killed at a station called Cullin-la-Ringo in central Queensland. It remains the single largest killing of European settlers by Aboriginal people in Australian colonial history. There's a cairn marking their graves. Their names are recorded. Their deaths are documented in careful, specific detail.

The Gayiri people killed in the months that followed have no memorial. In most accounts, they don't even have a name.

This episode tells both sides of what happened at Cullin-la-Ringo — including the part that almost never gets told. The false sheep accusation that triggered the original killing at Rainworth station the week before. The strong historical case that the attack on the Wills party was a case of mistaken identity, aimed at the wrong man entirely. The seven Native Police detachments deployed in the aftermath. The settler accounts of groups being lined up in open fields and shot as they ran. A death toll that may have reached three hundred, depending on whose count you trust.

We also talk about the man who survived because he was out mustering horses that afternoon — Tom Wills, co-founder of Australian Rules football and coach of the first Australian cricket team to tour England, who also, by credible historical account, organised armed reprisal raids against the Gayiri in the weeks after his father's death. Two facts about the same man that most sporting histories have never quite managed to hold in the same paragraph.

And we talk about the roadside sign erected in 2009 that names the nineteen settler dead in specific detail — and doesn't write the word Gayiri anywhere on it.

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.

In 1974, a gardener named Eddie Mabo was having lunch with two historians at James Cook University in Townsville when the conversation turned to his home — a small island called Mer, out in the Torres Strait. Mabo started talking about his family's land. The historians glanced at each other. They knew something he didn't. Under Australian law, that land wasn't his. It belonged to the Crown.

His response was immediate. No way. It's not theirs. It's ours.

That lunchtime conversation is, as much as any single moment can be, where the most significant land rights case in Australian history began.

This episode tells the full story of Eddie Koiki Mabo — the man before the case. The boy exiled from his own island as a teenager. The union organiser. The man who had to leave his community just to access the old age pension. The activist who co-founded a school so his own children wouldn't grow up cut off from their language and culture. And then the ten-year legal fight that followed, including the Queensland Government's extraordinary attempt to pass a law specifically designed to make his case disappear — and the High Court striking that law down instead.

We also talk honestly about what native title actually is, and isn't — because the popular memory of Mabo sometimes treats it as a sweeping handback of land that it was never designed to be. And we talk about the fact that Eddie Mabo died five months before the verdict. Three of the five original plaintiffs never heard the outcome at all.

Terra nullius. Land belonging to no one. A legal fiction that underpinned two centuries of dispossession — finally, formally, declared exactly that.

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.

On the morning of the 20th of January 1842, around five thousand people gathered on Franklin Street in Melbourne to watch two men hanged. It was the first execution the settlement had ever carried out. It didn't go cleanly. One of the men strangled slowly at the end of the rope, in front of the entire crowd. Both were buried in unmarked graves. Today, that exact spot sits underneath the Queen Victoria Market — where most visitors walking through have absolutely no idea what's beneath their feet.

Their names were Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner. Both were Tasmanian Aboriginal men who had already survived the Black War. Both had spent years working as guides for the colonial protection system. And the judge who sentenced them to death admitted, openly, that he designed the execution specifically to terrorise other Aboriginal people into submission.

This episode traces how two survivors of one genocide ended up on trial for their lives on the other side of Bass Strait — and why, when you understand what both men had already lived through, their final months in Victoria look a lot less like crime and a lot more like a second act of resistance. We talk about the lawyer who argued the colonial court had no right to try them at all, the rule that stopped them from speaking in their own defence, and the woman who was walking beside them when they were captured — Truganini herself.

We also talk about what's underneath the Queen Victoria Market, and how long it took for anyone to put a name to it.

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.

On the 27th of May 1967, Australians went to the polls and delivered the most lopsided result in this country's referendum history. Ninety point seven seven per cent voted yes. Every single state. No organised opposition. The highest yes vote ever recorded for a federal referendum, before or since.

Most Australians will tell you it's the day Aboriginal people got the right to vote. Or citizenship. Neither of those things is true — and understanding what it actually did, and didn't do, tells you almost everything about how this country handles Aboriginal recognition.

This episode traces the decade-long campaign that got the referendum over the line, led largely by Aboriginal women — Faith Bandler, Pearl Gibbs, and a network of organisers who spent ten years petitioning, marching, and showing up at parliament with signatures until politicians ran out of reasons to say no. We talk about what the two constitutional clauses actually said, why removing them mattered, and why the practical change for Aboriginal communities was slower and more complicated than the landslide result suggested.

We also place 1967 directly alongside October 2023 — two referendums, fifty-six years apart, both about the legal and political standing of Aboriginal people in this country's Constitution. One passed with near-unanimous support. The other failed. The contrast says something uncomfortable about how much has, and hasn't, shifted in the time between them.

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.

On the 27th of October 1857, around a hundred Yiman warriors attacked a homestead called Hornet Bank on the upper Dawson River in central Queensland. Eleven settlers were killed. It's remembered today as one of the deadliest attacks on white settlers in Australian colonial history — and it has its own cairn, listed on Queensland's official heritage register.

What happened over the following months has no memorial at all.

In the reprisal campaign that followed, somewhere between ninety and three hundred Yiman people were killed by Native Police, settler militias, and one man with a very personal grudge — a man who shot two acquitted defendants dead as they walked out of a Rockhampton courthouse, in broad daylight, and was never once arrested for it. A parliamentary inquiry looked directly at the evidence and recommended funding more of whatever had caused it. And the Yiman people, who colonial accounts assumed had been wiped out entirely, survived anyway — scattered, dispossessed, and largely unnamed in the historical record for over a century.

We also talk about why the attack happened in the first place — including the false sheep accusation that triggered the whole thing — and the 2016 Federal Court ruling where a judge sat in a packed country town hall in Taroom and finally said the land had always been theirs.

Eleven names on a heritage cairn. Somewhere between ninety and three hundred names that nobody bothered to write down.

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.

On the 23rd of August 1966, around two hundred Gurindji stockmen, domestic workers, and their families put down their tools at Wave Hill cattle station in the Northern Territory and walked off the job. They weren't just striking for fair wages. They were asking for their land back.

This is the story of Vincent Lingiari, the Gurindji elder who led a nine-year standoff against one of the most powerful pastoral companies in the world, sustained by union levies, international solidarity strikes, and a young eye surgeon's spontaneous five hundred dollar donation. It's the story of a community that turned down twenty new government houses because housing was never actually the point. And it's the story of a Prime Minister kneeling in red dirt, pouring a handful of soil into an old man's open hand, in a moment that became one of the most iconic photographs in Australian history — and still wasn't quite what it looked like.

We also talk about what actually happened after the cameras left. The conditional lease. The government that tried to claw it back. The twenty more years it took to get freehold title. And the native title recognition that finally arrived in 2020, fifty-four years after that first walk-off.

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.