This was Djadjawurrung country, held for countless generations, when in late 1837 a sheep station called Barfold was pushed onto it. The owner, William Henry Yaldwyn, sent his overseer John Coppock to drive four thousand sheep up from the Goulburn district to a site on the Campaspe River, about thirteen kilometres north of present-day Kyneton. The intrusion was not peaceful. According to the colonial record itself, Coppock's men soon fell into the habit of shooting the Aboriginal people who lived there, including women and children. That detail matters, because the killings that followed are often told as a 'reprisal', as though violence began with the Djadjawurrung. It did not. It began with the men who came to take the grass and water for their flocks.

The trigger, by the colonists' account, was the death of two of Coppock's convict workers and the loss of sheep, which the Djadjawurrung were said to have driven off and were eating. An armed, mounted party tracked them to their camp in a gully and attacked after dark, catching the people by surprise as they cooked. The ground gave them almost nothing to defend with beyond their spears and shields, and spears are no answer to men firing down from horseback at a distance. Robinson set it down plainly: 'They fired from their horses; the blacks were down in the hole. They were out of distance of spears. One old man kept supplying them with spears and was soon shot. Great many were shot. Some held up pieces of bark to keep off the balls but it was no use.' When it ended, the dead numbered somewhere between eight and twenty-three. Two of the attackers had minor injuries.

Word did reach the authorities. When the Melbourne magistrate William Lonsdale learned of the killings, he passed the report to the Governor in Sydney, and Coppock and his party were summoned there to explain themselves, a rare step for violence done to Aboriginal people. It came to nothing. Coppock missed the boat from Williamstown and was never held to account. The vessel that was to carry the party, the Sarah, vanished without trace on that voyage, and in the confusion Coppock simply let people believe he had been lost with it. He disappeared into rural Victoria for years. No one was ever punished for the deaths at Waterloo Plains, and the count of the dead remains a range, not a number, to this day.

The violence did not stop with that single night. Conflict continued across these runs into the 1840s as more Aboriginal people were driven off their own country. In January 1840 Robinson returned and found the massacre site himself, a small hill behind an abandoned hut beyond the Coliban River. While he was there, the landholder Henry Monro called up a detachment of Mounted Police for another punitive raid, and at least two more unarmed Djadjawurrung men were killed and others gravely wounded. One man, named in the record as Munnangabumbum, was captured, beaten, chained hand and foot, and carried off to Melbourne. These were people with names, families, ceremonies and a homeland of their own. The plain held their dead, and for a long time it held their story too, until it was finally written down and listed among the massacres this country is still learning to face.