The Wirrayaraay were not strangers passing through. They had lived for months at Peter MacIntyre's nearby Keera station, and were well known to the local stockmen. They had come to Myall Creek, on Henry Dangar's run beside the Gwydir River, precisely because they trusted the men there to protect them. Roughly thirty-five people made up the camp — families, elders, and children, some too young to walk. This is the detail that the records insist we not forget. These were not combatants. They were people who had accepted an invitation, who were preparing for an ordinary evening, and who fled to a stockman's hut pleading for help when armed riders appeared. The hut offered no protection. It became, in the words of the trial judge, the mesh of destruction.

Eleven stockmen, led by a free settler named John Henry Fleming, rode in on horseback. They were former and serving convicts; ten were European, and one, John Johnstone, was a Black African. When the station hutkeeper George Anderson asked what they meant to do, John Russell answered that they were taking the people "over the back of the range" to frighten them. Instead, in a gully about half a mile west of the huts, they killed nearly everyone. Most were cut down with swords; Anderson, who refused to take part, heard only two shots. One woman was kept alive and abused for days. Two days later the men returned to burn the bodies, hoping to erase the evidence. When station manager William Hobbs came back and found the remains, he could count only to twenty-eight — the dead had been beheaded and dismembered, and an exact number was impossible to reach.

Hobbs reported what he had found, though Kilmeister tried to talk him out of it. Word travelled by horseback to Sydney and reached Governor George Gipps, who — backed by Attorney General John Plunkett — refused to let it pass. Police Magistrate Edward Denny Day rode the frontier gathering evidence and arrested eleven of the twelve men. The first jury, sympathetic to the settlers, acquitted them. Plunkett pressed a second trial. This time seven men were convicted of murder. Justice Burton, who is reported to have wept as he sentenced them, spoke of "babies hanging at their mothers' breasts" among the slain. On 18 December 1838, after the Executive Council rejected every plea for clemency, the seven were hanged in Sydney — the first British subjects executed for the murder of Aboriginal people.

Much of the colony was furious — not at the killers, but at the hangings. The Sydney Herald called the prosecution "judicial murder" and ran editorials that came close to advocating extermination. Fleming, the ringleader, was never caught; he lived out his days as a respected farmer and justice of the peace. The grim aftermath was that many settlers learned the wrong lesson, turning to poison and pacts of silence to avoid future trials. Yet not every voice joined the chorus. Days after the verdict, the poet Eliza Hamilton Dunlop published "The Aboriginal Mother" in The Australian, grieving for the victims and insisting on their humanity. In 2023, on the massacre's 185th anniversary, the Sydney Morning Herald formally apologised for its predecessor's role in "spreading racist views and misinformation while campaigning for the killers to escape justice."

The descendants carried the weight quietly for generations. One spoke of driving past the place as a child — "it just had a feeling about it that I can't explain." In 2000, that silence was broken with intention. Lyall Munro Snr, a descendant of survivors, helped lead the creation of a memorial north-east of Bingara, where the dead are now honoured by name and by truth. Each year on 10 June, descendants of the victims and descendants of the perpetrators gather at the same ground, in an act of reconciliation that asks nothing be forgotten. The artist Ben Quilty painted the massacre after consulting Gamilaraay elders Aunty Sue Blacklock and Uncle Lyall Munro. To stand here is to understand that remembering the murdered is not the same as reopening a wound — it is the beginning of honouring it.