The brigantine Maria, built in Dublin in 1823, departed Port Adelaide on 26 June 1840 bound for Hobart under Captain William Ettrick Smith, carrying a mate, eight crew, and 16 passengers including women and children. On 28 June 1840 the ship wrecked on the Margaret Brock Reef near Cape Jaffa. The wreck itself has never been located, though debris later washed ashore at Lacepede Bay.
All aboard reached land safely, but none survived to give a firsthand account of what followed. Surviving accounts, largely reconstructed after the fact, indicate the group split up while trekking along the Coorong coast toward Adelaide-area settlements. Passengers who separated from Captain Smith and the crew were attacked, killed, and their remains found decapitated, clubbed, or buried in sand and wombat burrows. A search party led by William Pullen, accompanied by Dr Richard Penney, sailors, a police trooper, and Aboriginal interpreters, departed Adelaide on 28 July 1840 and located a massacre site on 30 July, recovering scattered remains and two wedding rings later identified as belonging to two of the passengers. Accounts differ as to whether 25 or 26 people were killed in total; either figure represents what is described as the largest killing of colonists by Aboriginal people in Australian history.
Following Pullen's report, Governor George Gawler ordered a further punitive expedition under Major Thomas O'Halloran, which departed Goolwa on 22 August 1840 with police, sailors, and Aboriginal guides from Encounter Bay. The party detained 65 Aboriginal people on 23 August; three men were killed and others wounded during the operation. Maria's log-book, bloodstained clothing, and silver spoons were recovered from encampments. On 25 August 1840, O'Halloran summarily sentenced two Aboriginal men, identified as Mongarawata and Pilgarie, to death without trial; they were hanged the same day and their bodies left on display. Two additional men were shot while attempting to escape by swimming.
The legality of the executions was widely disputed. Judge Charles Cooper advised Governor Gawler that British law could not be applied to the Milmenrura, as they had not submitted to colonial authority, despite Aboriginal South Australians having been formally declared British subjects in 1836. The Aborigines' Protection Society condemned Gawler's actions, and the Colonial Office in London later concluded that the executions constituted murder under law, though no prosecution followed. The controversy contributed to Gawler's recall as governor.
Bodies of victims were recovered over the following months at several sites. Oral history maintained by Ngarrindjeri people, including accounts recorded from elder Tom Trevorrow in 2003 and earlier from anthropologist Norman Tindale in 1934, describe a different sequence of events, including allegations that crew members had attempted to sexually interfere with Aboriginal women, provoking the killings under tribal law. Some Indigenous oral history also holds that the men executed by O'Halloran's party were not those responsible. A commemorative monument was erected at Kingston SE in 1966, and a collaborative project involving First Nations groups and the National Trust of South Australia has since sought to present Indigenous perspectives on the events.
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