Long before any European stood here, the Peerapper people called this windswept corner of north-west Tasmania Kennaook, and they knew it as a place of abundance, of seals, kangaroo, and the muttonbirds that nested on the offshore islets they named the Doughboys. On 10 February 1828, that abundance became a trap. Aboriginal women had swum out to the Doughboys to gather muttonbirds, leaving their families on the beach below the cliffs. Four shepherds from the Van Diemen's Land Company lay in wait. When the shooting was over, around thirty Peerapper men, women and children were dead, and a place that had fed people for thousands of years had become a killing ground.
The massacre did not erupt from nowhere. The Van Diemen's Land Company had been granted a vast tract of the Peerapper homeland, and its convict shepherds treated the original owners as obstacles. The provocations ran one direction first. In late 1827, Peerapper men were killed trying to protect their women from sexual assault by company servants. In response, the Peerapper drove a flock of the company's sheep over the cliffs, a calculated blow against the intruders' livelihood. The Cape Grim killings were the company men's retaliation for the sheep, an act of vengeance carried out not against warriors in a fight but against families gathering food. The sequence matters: the people defending their country and their families were treated as the aggressors, and answered with slaughter.
We know what happened largely because George Augustus Robinson, sent by the colonial governor as a so-called conciliator, came to investigate two years later. Aboriginal women described the ambush. The four perpetrators were company shepherds Charles Chamberlain, William Gunchannon, Richard Nicholson, and John Weavis. Chamberlain admitted a toll of around thirty dead; Gunchannon, told that figure, reportedly "seemed to glory in the act" and said he would shoot them whenever he met them. The company's chief agent, Edward Curr, later tried to recast the event, claiming a "very large" Aboriginal force had massed on a hill above a hut and that the men fired in self-defence. Historian Ian McFarlane dismantled that account. The hut sat a kilometre away, surveyors' charts showed, well beyond spear range, and abandoning its cover to fight uphill against superior numbers would, in McFarlane's words, have been "an act of gross stupidity." The witnesses spoke only of the beach. Curr's hill, McFarlane concluded, was an invention designed to make victims look like attackers.
Cape Grim was not an isolated horror but one episode in a methodical destruction. By McFarlane's account, the Aboriginal people of Tasmania's north-west were systematically hunted by company expeditions operating under Curr's control. Between 400 and 500 people lived in the region when the company arrived. By 1830, scarcely two years after the massacre, their number had fallen to fewer than sixty. Among those swept up in the aftermath was an eighteen-year-old man from Robbins Island whom the sealers called "Jack of Cape Grim." His name was Tunnerminnerwait. He would later become one of the most significant figures in colonial Tasmania's tragic history, a survivor of a community being erased from its own country.
For more than a century the bay below the cliffs carried a name that quietly blamed the dead: Suicide Bay, as though the Peerapper had thrown themselves off rather than been shot and pushed. In 2021, that lie was undone. The bay was restored to its Aboriginal name, Taneneryouer, and Cape Grim itself given the dual name Kennaook, the word the Peerapper had used all along. The renaming did not soften what happened here. It did something more important: it returned the language of this place to the people it was stolen from, and refused to let a massacre hide behind a euphemism. The wind still scours these cliffs. Now, at least, it blows over honest ground.
Kennaook / Cape Grim sits at the far north-west tip of Tasmania at approximately 40.67°S, 144.69°E, where the cliffs meet Bass Strait. The offshore Doughboy Islands and the prominent Cape Grim cliffs (rising roughly 60 metres from the sea) make clear visual landmarks; the Woolnorth wind farm turbines stand nearby. The closest airfields are Smithton (YSMI) to the east and Wynyard / Burnie (YWYY) further along the north coast. This is one of the windiest measured places in Australia, home to the Cape Grim baseline air-monitoring station precisely because the air arrives unobstructed across thousands of kilometres of ocean. Expect strong, persistent westerlies, low cloud, and turbulence near the cliff line. This is a place to pass with respect, for the air and for its history.