Philosophy and Ideas

The Feeling of Responsibility

M. A. Casey

... My father’s farm was situated at a locality called Perry Bridge, in between the Avon and Perry rivers. At the south of the property the Perry runs into the Avon, forming a sandy point of land, and shortly thereafter the Avon runs into a large lake. The lake is named for the Duke of Wellington, but the spit at the confluence of the Perry and Avon rivers, known as Boney Point, is named for an altogether more inglorious reason. I remember my father telling me how, well into the 1960s, you could still find bones and bone fragments on this sandy point from a massacre of the local Aborigines, the Kurnai, which took place in 1840. The massacres of the Aborigines in Gippsland often occurred near water, to which the Kurnai were driven and then trapped. The massacre at Boney Point took place after a settler was killed and sheep were found with their legs broken. It is not clear how many Kurnai were killed at Boney Point, but four years afterwards, in 1844, a missionary found so many bones and skulls at this place that it could have been mistaken for a native burial ground.

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