The Cullin-la-ringo massacre, also known as the Wills tragedy, was a massacre of white colonists by Indigenous Australians that occurred on 17 October 1861, north of modern-day Springsure in Central Queensland, Australia. Nineteen men, women and children were killed in the attack, including Horatio Wills, the owner of Cullin-la-ringo station. It is the single largest massacre of colonists by Aboriginal people in Australian history. In the weeks afterwards, police, native police and civilian posses carried out "one of the most lethal punitive expeditions in frontier history", hunting down and killing up to 370 members of the Gayiri Aboriginal tribe implicated in the massacre.[1]
In mid-October 1861, a party of squatters from the colony of Victoria, under Horatio Wills, set up a temporary tent camp to start the process of establishing a cattle station at Cullin-la-ringo, a property formed by amalgamating four blocks of land with a total area of 260km2. Wills's party, an enormous settlement train, including bullock wagons and more than 10,000 sheep, had set out from Brisbane eight months earlier. The size of the group had attracted much attention from other settlers, as well as the Indigenous people.
It was later reported that the attack on the party was as revenge for the murder of Gayiri men by Wills' neighbour, Jesse Gregson, a squatter from the nearby Rainworth Station, who had erroneously accused the Gayiri of stealing cattle.[2]
According to the account of one of the survivors, John Moore, Aboriginal people had been passing through the camp all day on 17 October 1861, building up numbers until there were at least 50. Then, without warning, they attacked the men, women, and children with nulla nullas. The settlers defended themselves with pistols and tent poles, but nineteen of the twenty-five defenders were killed.
Those killed were Horatio Wills, David Baker, the overseer, his wife, Catherine Baker, their son, David Baker Jr., the overseer's daughter, Elizabeth Baker (aged 19), Iden Baker (a young boy), an infant Baker (8 months old), George Elliott, Patrick Mannion and his wife, their three children, Mary Ann Mannion (8 years old), Maggie Mannion (4 years old), baby Mannion (an infant), Edward McCormac, Charles Weeden, James Scott, Henry Pickering, George Ling, and a bullock driver known as Tom O'Brien, who had been engaged at Rockhampton. A total of 19 people were killed.[2]
The dead were buried at the site of the massacre.[3] Some of the graves have headstones.[4]
The six surviving members were Tom Wills, Horatio's son and an outstanding cricketer and co-founder of Australian rules football, James Baker (David Baker's son), John Moore, William Albrey, Edward Kenny, and Patrick Mahony. Those men either were either absent from the camp or, in Moore's case, managed to avoid being seen. It was Edward Kenny who subsequently rode away to report the massacre, arriving at Rainworth Station the following day. Moore was the only white eyewitness to the event.
The first to go out in pursuit were a vigilante party of eleven heavily armed white settlers assisted by two trackers. Judging by the more than fifty camp fires, they pursued what was estimated to be "probably not under 300, and of these 100 may be assumed as the number of fighting men".[5]
The Aboriginal people continually used ground that prevented the whites from using their horses to full advantage: "they chose stony and difficult ground wherever they had it in their power". Yet the whites eventually managed to catch up with them on 27 November 1861 and at "half-past two a.m. on Wednesday morning their camp was stormed on foot with success". From this account, the number of Aboriginal casualties was very high, although there was no further detail. Another contemporary account said the police "overtook a tribe of natives, shot down sixty or seventy, and ceased firing when their ammunition was expended".[6]