Excerpt: Soon after I enrolled to study law in 1979, I read Stephen Lendrum’s article about the 1840 Coorong massacre in the ‘Adelaide Law Review’. I belong to the land and peoples of the Coorong, and had been aware of the Coorong massacre from stories told to me by my family and elders. I had an Aboriginal worldview of the colonial frontier. The Coorong massacre occurred after 26 new settlers, who had survived the ‘Maria’ shipwreck, died at the hands of Coorong Tanganekald Milmendjeri people. A punitive expedition was dispatched from Adelaide, and the number of First Nations Peoples’ lives lost to the punitive mission remains unknown. Our Aboriginal oral history maintains that it was many. The punitive mission might have been intended to bring the offenders to ‘justice’, but it was an unlawful process under British law, and unlawful in respect of Aboriginal law. The British did not declare martial law at the time, and two Aboriginal men were executed without trial.
