Murdering Gully massacre

Murdering Gully, formerly known as Puuroyup to the Djargurd Wurrung people, is the site of an 1839 massacre in the Camperdown district of the Port Phillip District of the colony of New South Wales (present-day Victoria, Australia). The gully lies on Mount Emu Creek, where a small stream joins from Merida Station. An estimated 35–40 people of the Tarnbeere Gundidj clan of the Djargurd Wurrung were killed, an event which effectively destroyed the clan. The massacre is unusually well documented, with oral history, settler diaries, Wesleyan missionary records, and Aboriginal Protectorate records all corroborating the events.

The killings were carried out by Frederick Taylor, manager of Glenormiston station, together with associates named James Hamilton and Bloomfield, and several shepherds in Taylor's employ. According to a deposition taken by Edward Williamson, an overseer at the Wesleyan Buntingdale Mission, based on an account from a survivor named Wore-gu-i-moni, the group advanced in an extended line and opened fire on the sleeping camp, killing all they could see — reported as thirty-five people, including men, women and children. Bodies were reportedly thrown into a waterhole and later burned. Charles Sievwright, Assistant Protector of Aborigines, separately collected a statement from a survivor, Wan-geg-a-mon, whose wife and child were killed in the attack, describing a similar account of the assault and the subsequent disposal and burning of bodies.

The attack was reportedly triggered by a shepherd's report that sheep had been killed by two unidentified Aboriginal people, amid broader dispossession that had left Aboriginal clans without access to traditional food sources such as kangaroo and emu. George Robinson, Chief Protector of Aborigines, questioned the basis for Taylor's allegation in a letter to Sievwright dated 11 July 1839, suggesting the shepherd himself might have killed the sheep.

Following the massacre, popular disapproval of Taylor led to the renaming of "Taylor's River" as Mount Emu Creek. Taylor, who had previously been implicated in the 1836 killing of a Wathaurong man named Woolmudgin, fled to Van Diemen's Land to avoid that earlier prosecution, and later fled to India around 1839–1840 fearing prosecution for the Murdering Gully massacre. Glenormiston station's new owner, Niel Black, recorded in his journal in 1840 that an estimated 35–40 Aboriginal people had been "despatched" on the property and that only two men of the clan remained alive; Black continued policies of dispossession on the land. Taylor later returned to Victoria, worked in Gippsland, and was denied a land grant by Commissioner Charles Tyers due to his treatment of Aboriginal people, though Governor Charles La Trobe later recorded that charges against Taylor had "ended in satisfactory disproval." No prosecution of Taylor for the Murdering Gully massacre is recorded to have occurred.