Stapleton Siding massacre

The Stapleton Siding massacre refers to the mass killing of Aboriginal Australians at Stapleton Siding, in the Northern Territory of Australia. According to available records, the massacre was carried out by supplying poisoned damper — bread that likely contained weed-killer — to a group of Kungarakany and Warray people. The poisoning is reported to have killed approximately 80 people from these two Aboriginal groups.

The event is understood today largely through oral history rather than extensive contemporaneous documentary records. One of the most notable survivors was the Aboriginal elder Alngindabu, who was described as a child at the time. Alngindabu later passed down an account of the massacre to her son, Joe McGinness, who became a prominent Aboriginal political activist. This intergenerational transmission forms a key part of how the massacre has been recorded and recognised.

The massacre is documented by the Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia, 1788–1930 research project at the University of Newcastle, which records frontier violence against Aboriginal peoples across Australia's colonial and early post-colonial periods.

The project's entry dates the event to July 1895 and identifies the attackers only as colonists; it does not name individual perpetrators or describe judicial proceedings.