Campaspe Plains massacre

The Campaspe Plains massacre took place in 1839 in Central Victoria, Australia, during the period of violent conflict arising from British colonial occupation of Dja Dja Wurrung and Taungurung country. Charles Hutton had taken over the Campaspe pastoral run in 1838, an area near the border of Dja Dja Wurrung and Taungurung lands, following earlier sporadic confrontations between settlers and Aboriginal people.

The immediate chain of events began in April 1839, when five Indigenous people were killed by three white men. In apparent response, Taungurung people killed two European station workers, shepherd Hugh Bryan and hut keeper James Neill, in May 1839. Before killing the two men, the Taungurung had robbed a hut of bedding, clothes, guns and ammunition, and had driven off a flock of 700 sheep from the property — actions that have been described as possible retribution for the earlier deaths of the five Aboriginal people. The Taungurung were noted as enemies of the neighbouring Dja Dja Wurrung people.

In response to the killings of Bryan and Neill, Hutton assembled an armed party of settlers, who tracked the group responsible and caught up with them, along with the flock of sheep, approximately 48 kilometres away near Campaspe Creek. An armed confrontation between the settler party and Aboriginal people lasted up to half an hour. Hutton privately claimed that nearly 40 Aboriginal people were killed in this confrontation.

The following month, Hutton led a party of mounted police to a camp of local Dja Dja Wurrung people near Campaspe Creek — people whom Hutton had previously forced off his run despite their having been friendly toward him since his arrival. The camp was charged by Hutton and the mounted police without warning; six Dja Dja Wurrung people were shot in the back and killed as they attempted to flee, and others were wounded.

Charles Parker, the Assistant Protector of Aborigines for the region, described the episode as a deliberately planned illegal reprisal against Aboriginal people, carried out on the principle — advocated by many in the colony at the time — that when an offence was committed by unidentified individuals, the entire tribe to which they belonged should be made to suffer collective punishment.

Colonial administrator George Robinson, in a journal entry dated 24 January 1840, recorded Hutton's own account of his approach to Aboriginal people: that his method was terror, to keep them in subjection by fear, and to punish "wholesale" by tribes and communities — destroying an entire tribe if a member offended, believing they must be exterminated.

No official action was taken against Hutton in connection with these killings.