The chain of events began with a man called Kalejika, who belonged to a Central Aranda local group. Kalejika visited the camp at Irbmangkara and then reported to Upper Southern Aranda men that the camp's aged and highly respected ceremonial chief, Ltjabakuka, along with some of his assistant elders, had committed sacrilege. The accusation was specific: they had given uninitiated boys men's blood to drink from a shield used for ritual purposes. In Arrernte customary law, sacrilege of this nature was an offense always punished by death. Whether Kalejika's accusation was accurate, exaggerated, or fabricated remains unknown. What is certain is that it was believed, and it set the punishment in motion.

According to historian Geoffrey Blainey, the Matuntara chose Running Waters because the Southern Arrernte could be readily surprised there, and they timed their raid for the evening, when their enemies were cooking their meals before settling down for the night. Three parties of warriors concealed themselves in the bushes of the nearby mountain slopes and in the undergrowth along the riverbed. When the people of Irbmangkara returned to their camp, the attackers rushed in. Spears and boomerangs struck with precision. Within minutes, Ltjabakuka and his men lay dead at their brush shelters. The warriors then turned on the women and older children, spearing or clubbing them. Finally, following the grim customary practice of avengers, they broke the limbs of infants and left them to die. One woman survived by pretending to be dead, then escaped northward to raise the alarm.

Moses Tjalkabota was a small child -- between six and nine years old -- when the massacre occurred. Two of his friends and their mother died in the raid. The next day, he witnessed the great clouds of smoke rising from funeral pyres as the bodies were burned. Decades later, Tjalkabota became a translator for Lutheran missionaries Carl Strehlow and his son Ted Strehlow at Hermannsburg. His eyewitness recollections, recorded and translated into English, provided the foundation for the most detailed accounts of the massacre. Ted Strehlow included a full narrative in his 1969 book Journey to Horseshoe Bend, while Carl Strehlow's recordings appear in his grandson John Strehlow's historical biography of the family.

Ted Strehlow wrote about the massacre as a case study in the incompatibility between Indigenous Australian customary law and the modern Australian legal system. The punishment fell on an entire community, including people who were "unwitting in the crime" -- a concept that, as Strehlow noted, was contrary to the legal principle of mens rea, the requirement that a guilty mind accompany a guilty act. His account remains one of the most unflinching descriptions of customary law enforcement in the anthropological record, and it raises questions that resist easy answers about the nature of collective punishment, sacred obligation, and the limits of cultural autonomy.

Professor Sam Gill of the University of Colorado Boulder analyzed the Strehlow accounts in his 1998 book Storytracking. He concluded that something significant occurred at Irbmangkara, on a scale that remained important to the peoples of the region more than a century later. The community at Hermannsburg, now known as Ntaria, confirmed to Gill that the events at Running Waters remained a shaping factor in local politics. Gill also noted independent evidence of continuing violence: a hunter named Nameia, a survivor of the 1875 massacre, was himself killed in 1890. Local constable William Willshire was involved in Aboriginal deaths at nearby Tempe Downs Station in 1891. The Finke River at Running Waters flows on, as it has for hundreds of millions of years. The people who live along it carry memories far more recent, and far heavier.