Central Australia in 1928 was in its fourth consecutive year of severe drought. Waterholes that had sustained Warlpiri, Anmatyerre, and Kaytetye people for generations were drying up. The new cattle stations had fenced off permanent soaks, the only reliable water left, and station managers drove Aboriginal people away from them to ensure the survival of their stock. Starving and displaced, people moved back toward the water sources on which their survival depended. The collision this produced was not random. It was the predictable consequence of a pastoral economy that regarded the original inhabitants as an inconvenience — or, as some put it at the time, an "aggravation".

Fred Brooks, 61, had worked as a station hand on Randall Stafford's Coniston Station since World War I. In July 1928, he took up dingo trapping for the ten-shilling bounty on scalps. Stafford warned him that Aboriginal people in the area had been threatening, and that he and his companion Alice — a woman believed by local Aboriginal people to have violated kinship rules by living with a white man — were in danger. Brooks left anyway, with two 12-year-old Aboriginal boys, Skipper and Dodger, as camel handlers. He made camp near a group of about 30 Ngalia-Warlpiri people at a soak called Yukurru, 14 miles from the homestead. After a few uneventful days, tensions over food, water, and the breach of kinship law surrounding Alice came to a head. Brooks was killed on 7 August 1928. His death became the trigger for what followed.

Murray arrived at Coniston Station on 14 August and began what would become eleven separate expeditions. He was accompanied by station workers and volunteers, moving through country where Warlpiri, Anmatyerre, and Kaytetye people lived. The killings were spread across a vast area, some at waterholes, some at camps. Those he shot were not confined to people connected to the killing of Brooks — they included men, women, and children encountered across the region. Official records submitted at the inquiry listed 31 dead. Anthropologist Ted Strehlow, who investigated the events in the 1930s, concluded the true figure was far higher. Subsequent analysis of documents and Aboriginal oral testimony has led researchers to estimate the death toll as high as 200.

Murray returned to Darwin as something of a hero. The inquiry found his actions justified; he was not charged. The Coniston massacre remained largely absent from mainstream Australian historical consciousness for decades. It was not until the 1980s and 1990s, as the broader history of frontier violence began to be examined in earnest, that Coniston was widely recognised for what it was: the last known officially sanctioned massacre of Indigenous Australians, and one of the last events of the Australian frontier wars. For the Warlpiri, Anmatyerre, and Kaytetye communities whose relatives were killed, it had never been forgotten. Commemorations at the massacre site have been held annually, and the stories have been carried forward in family memory across the generations.