South Australia was founded by British settlers in 1836, and within a few years they were pushing out from Adelaide onto land that had belonged to Aboriginal nations for tens of thousands of years. James Brown, a Scottish migrant, took up a vast pastoral run called Avenue Range, more than 170 square kilometres of country that the Tanganekald and their neighbours had never ceded. As Aboriginal people resisted being driven off, settlers answered first with threats and then with violence, hoping that terror would keep them clear of the sheep. Such killings usually went unreported. They had grown quieter and more careful after 1847, when a settler was hanged for murdering an Aboriginal man, the only such sentence ever carried out in early colonial South Australia. The fighting was undeclared but real, one front of the long Australian frontier wars.

In January 1849, word of killings near Guichen Bay reached Matthew Moorhouse, the colony's Protector of Aborigines, whose role was to safeguard Aboriginal lives and interests. He rode into the district with a policeman, an interpreter, and an Aboriginal guide. An Aboriginal witness named Leandermin led him to the place. Leandermin said he had heard gunshots, crept up behind some trees, and seen four or five women lying on the ground with fresh wounds, and others beyond them who did not move. Two white men stood among them. One, he said, was Brown, with a gun in his hand. Moorhouse examined the ground and found five pits holding human remains, scattered bones, and spent cartridge paper. Eighty paces off lay the ashes of a fire, and in it, more bones. The bodies had been buried, then dug up and burned, an effort to destroy what the earth might otherwise have kept.

Brown was charged in March 1849 and committed for trial. But the prosecution faced a wall built into the law itself. The Aboriginal Witnesses Act allowed Aboriginal people to give unsworn testimony, yet held that when a crime carried death or transportation, their evidence counted for nothing unless some other witness corroborated it. And the other witnesses melted away. Brown's overseer Eastwood, suspected as his accomplice, fled the colony on a whaling ship. A key witness left for the Port Phillip District. Leandermin himself, held at Guichen Bay, vanished, allegedly "made away with." The remaining witnesses knew Brown and would not speak against him. Three times Brown stood before the Supreme Court; three times the judge refused to proceed without more evidence. By November the case was struck from the lists. Settler solidarity and the rules of evidence had done their work. So glaring was the failure that the law was amended months later to allow conviction on Aboriginal testimony alone, too late for the dead of Avenue Range.

What happened next is its own quiet injustice. Brown grew rich, expanded his holdings, and died in 1890 a respected man; his estate funded charitable homes that operate to this day. As the decades passed, the killings did not disappear from memory so much as transform inside it. Storytellers turned the cold-blooded shooting into a sly poisoning, in which Aboriginal people supposedly stole tainted flour and so became, in the telling, complicit in their own deaths. They invented an epic horse ride to Adelaide, with Brown swimming the Murray to secure an alibi, until the legend celebrated his horsemanship rather than reckoning with his crime. Historians Robert Foster, Rick Hosking, and Amanda Nettelbeck traced how this "pioneer legend" steadily downplayed the atrocity. The murdered became a plot device; the murderer became a folk hero on a fast horse. To return to the contemporary record, with its blind old man and its baby, is to insist that real people died here, and that they are owed the truth.