Before any of this, the river had a different rhythm. Each winter the Bundjalung moved down from the ranges to the coast as the mullet ran thick in the estuary, and people from inland came carrying black bean seeds to trade for fish. They had lived this way along the Richmond River for thousands of years. Then, in the early 1840s, men arrived chasing red cedar, the timber they called red gold, and behind the cedar came sheep, squatters, and guns. What followed on this river was not a war between equals. It was a series of killings, most of them never properly recorded, in which Bundjalung families were shot in their sleep and poisoned at their campfires. These pages hold their story, as much of it as survives.
The country around the Richmond River mouth belonged to clans of the Bundjalung Nation, among them the Nyangbal of the East Ballina and South Ballina districts. They were not a vague presence on the land but communities with named camps, ceremonial grounds, and a calendar tuned to the river. One camping ground sat on a hillside near Black Head, facing the valley. Another clan, numbering around two hundred people, lived through the early years of Ballina township at South Ballina. These are the people the rest of this story is about. It matters to say so plainly, because in most of the old colonial accounts they appear only as a number, or as nothing at all.
In 1842, five colonists were killed at Pelican Creek, about ten kilometres north of Coraki, where squatters and sawyers had built a storehouse to hold cedar and supplies. The killing was real, and a boy survived to tell of it. But what it triggered reveals the brutal arithmetic of the frontier. Frightened settlers formed a mounted posse of eleven men, decided among themselves that a coastal clan was responsible, and rode out to take revenge with muskets and pistols. Guilt was not established. It was assigned. On the colonial frontier, the death of a settler routinely licensed the killing of far more Aboriginal people than had ever been involved, and often of people who had done nothing at all.
What came to be called the Evans Head massacre, also known as the Goanna Headland massacre, took place in 1842. European settlers, squatters, sawyers, and Border Police rode to a Nyangbal camp at Goanna Headland near Evans Head and opened fire. The most commonly cited figure is a hundred Bundjalung dead; some Bundjalung oral histories put the number at three hundred. The matter was reported to the colonial government, and nothing was done. When the survivors returned to the ruined camp, they sought no revenge. The exact toll will never be known, because no one in authority thought the dead worth counting.
Not all the killing came by gun. In the early 1860s, the Nyangbal clan at South Ballina was given flour to make damper, and the flour was laced with poison. The plan relied on trust, on the ordinary act of accepting food. Some of the older people and the children refused the damper because it was an unfamiliar food, and so they lived. The next morning, the survivors woke to find nearly a hundred and fifty adults dead. There is something especially cold in a massacre disguised as a gift, and something unbearably human in the detail that the children's wariness of strange bread is part of why anyone survived at all. These were poisonings carried out against neighbours, on stolen land.
The Richmond River killings sit within the wider Australian frontier wars, alongside places like Myall Creek, where in 1838 some of the perpetrators were, exceptionally, hanged. Here, no one was punished. The death tolls remain contested to this day, recorded late, passed down through Bundjalung memory, and argued over by historians, because the colonial record was indifferent or actively silent. That uncertainty is itself part of the truth: a society that counts its losses precisely does not lose count of the people it kills. What is not in dispute is that the Bundjalung were here first, that they were killed for their country, and that their descendants still live along this river and still remember. The quiet ground where the camps once stood is not empty. It is full of names that were never written down.
The events described occurred around the lower Richmond River near Ballina, New South Wales, with the South Ballina locality near 28.877°S, 153.505°E and the Evans Head / Goanna Headland coast about 30 km to the south. From the air this is a gentle coastal floodplain: the broad Richmond River winding to its mouth at Ballina, sugarcane and pasture on the flats, the long sweep of South Ballina Beach. Ballina Byron Gateway Airport (ICAO YBNA) is the nearest field, a few kilometres north of the river mouth; Evans Head Memorial Aerodrome (YEVD) lies near the southern site. This is a place to overfly with reflection rather than spectacle. Best light is the soft early morning that would have lit these camps at dawn, the hour at which several of the raids were made.