To understand the killing, you have to understand what came before it. The Gayiri people had lived in this part of central Queensland for thousands of years, and by 1861 they were watching it taken from them paddock by paddock. Shortly before the Wills party arrived, a neighbouring squatter, Jesse Gregson of Rainworth Station, had wrongly blamed the Gayiri for stealing sheep and had Gayiri men killed in response. The frontier ran on this logic: a loss of stock answered with a loss of life, a death answered with a death. Wills walked his enormous, conspicuous train into a district where blood was already owed, and camped on it without a fence or a sentry. The size of his party had drawn attention from every direction, settler and Aboriginal alike. He was not the cause of the grievance. He was simply the largest target standing on contested ground.

By the survivor John Moore's account, Gayiri people moved through the camp all that day, unremarkable at first, their numbers slowly building until perhaps fifty were present. Then, without warning, they attacked with nulla nullas. The settlers fought back with pistols and tent poles. It was over quickly. Nineteen of the twenty-five people in camp were killed, among them Horatio Wills, and men, women and children of his party. Six survived, most because they were elsewhere; Moore lived only by staying out of sight. Edward Kenny rode through the night to raise the alarm at Rainworth. For the Wills family it was annihilation. For the Gayiri it was, in the brutal accounting of the frontier, a debt collected. Both readings can be true at once, and the honest telling of this place requires holding them together rather than choosing one.

The dead at Cullin-la-ringo were soon outnumbered by the dead who answered for them. Settlers reacted with shock and fury, and police, native police and civilian posses launched what one historian called one of the most lethal punitive expeditions in frontier history. The Gayiri retreated into stony, broken ground where horses were useless; the pursuers came on foot, storming a camp before dawn on 27 November. Estimates of the Aboriginal death toll have long run as high as 370. A recent study by the University of Newcastle's Colonial Frontier Massacres researchers puts it nearer 90. Many of those killed had nothing to do with the attack on the camp. This was the pattern of the Queensland frontier wars: a single act of resistance answered with indiscriminate, far larger slaughter, and the numbers on the Aboriginal side recorded carelessly, if at all.

Horatio Wills had a son who was not in camp that day. Tom Wills was two days' ride away, gathering stores at Albinia. He would become one of Australia's first great cricketers and, a few years later, a founder and coach of the game that became Australian rules football, even coaching an Aboriginal cricket team that toured England. For more than a century he was remembered as a grieving son who took no part in revenge. That portrait has since been complicated by a sensationalised 1895 Chicago newspaper article, published fifteen years after his death, that claimed he boasted of reprisals and described his mother's and sisters' heads on sticks. The grislier details were demonstrably false: none of the women had ever set foot in Queensland, the Gayiri did not practise that kind of mutilation, and Tom was far away when it happened. What remains is a harder, quieter truth: a man marked for life by a war he did not start, on land that was never empty.