The Pinjarra Massacre in the Age of the Statue Wars

The Pinjarra Massacre of 1834 was a large-scale colonial attack on Aboriginal people in Western Australia. Led by Governor James Stirling, a party of British police, soldiers and settlers ambushed a group of Bindjareb Noongar, killing of at least 15 Bindjareb Noongar men by Stirling’s reckoning, and as many as 80 men, women, and children by other accounts. Though the event was widely recorded in the nineteenth-century, this massacre was effaced in the commemoration of its leader–Governor Stirling. This article will trace the history of the massacre and how it has been remembered, the troubled history of a statue of Stirling which still stands in the city of Perth, and the fight by Bindjareb Noongar to establish a memorial to the victims.