This is Waluwarra country, and has been for far longer than there have been fences across it. Their lands run through the dry, open tablelands of the far west, along the Georgina River and Pituri Creek, around Urandangi and the parish of Moonah where the tree stands. They are a people of this specific, demanding landscape of gidgee and coolibah and spinifex, who knew its waters and its seasons across countless generations. When pastoralists pushed cattle onto the Barkly Tableland from the 1870s, they did not arrive at empty land. They arrived in the middle of a nation, and the conflict that followed was not a clash of strangers but an invasion of a homeland whose people had every reason, and every right, to resist.

The Waluwarra account, carried in the oral history of the Waluwarra Aboriginal Corporation, is specific. Two policemen stationed at Urandangi, helped by Aboriginal trackers, rounded up a group of Waluwarra people said to have speared cattle. The men were competing with Aboriginal families for the same country and the same scarce water, and stock losses were met not with arrest and trial but with reprisal. The police built a timber gallows in the fork of the gum and hanged the prisoners, fifteen of them by the count that survives, as a warning to everyone watching. No record was kept of their names. They were somebody's parents, somebody's children, somebody's brothers and sisters, and the colonial state that killed them did not think their identities worth writing down. That silence in the archive is its own kind of violence, and the remembering that fills it is the work of the descendants who refuse to let the dead go nameless and forgotten.

What the police wrote down, and what actually happened, are not the same history. No documentary evidence of the Moonah Creek hangings has ever been found, and historians note that in the long, bloody operation of Queensland's Native Police, the killings were almost always by gun rather than rope. Some have suggested the beam grown into the gum might instead have been a butchering frame for cattle, of a kind found on many stations. But the absence of a paper trail proves nothing about the absence of a crime, least of all on a frontier where massacres went deliberately unrecorded and where the men who carried them out had every reason to keep no ledger. The Waluwarra do not doubt what happened here. The Queensland Heritage Register, in listing the place in 2005, recognised it for exactly what they have always said it is: a conflict site, a true witness to the violence that ran through the frontier.

The tree itself is dying, or already dead. A report in 2003 found it reduced to about eight metres, two of its four great limbs gone, the very limb that had held the gallows beam fallen and broken on the ground, the beam itself missing, the trunk cracked and eaten through by termites. Nature is slowly taking back the wood. But the place does not lose its meaning when the timber rots. For the Waluwarra and for the wider community of the region, Moonah Creek remains a site of mourning and of memory, somewhere the past is not abstract but rooted in a particular patch of red ground beside a particular creek. Australia is dotted with such trees, quiet markers of a war that the nation took a long time to name. This one is remembered out loud, which is the least the dead are owed.