Kate Auty on the true story of the Forrest River massacre in 'O'Leary of the Underworld'

Good Reading Podcast

In June 1926, a posse of police officers and white civilians murdered at least twenty Oombulgurri people at Forrest River in the Kimberley. After the massacre, a conspiracy of silence descended. Witnesses vanished. One of the massacre’s perpetrators was Bernard O’Leary, a former soldier whose land holding was known as ‘the underworld’. At the 1927 Royal Commission into the killings, O’Leary was portrayed by his lawyer as a simple honest backwoodsman who was framed. In this powerful account, Kate Auty argues that O’Leary was in fact ‘vicious, brazen and a bullshitter’, with ‘a propensity for brutality’. Although never charged, O'Leary played a leading role in the murders, and his duplicitous testimony thwarted the commission’s work.
Driven by both forensic and moral judgement, the book exposes the injustices embedded in Australian settlement history, and the culture of denial that has prevented truth-telling in this country.
In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Kate Auty about the history of Australia we've been told in the past and the new era of truth telling we are embracing, Bernard O'Leary's dark past of violence and wilful deception that makes him the likely candidate as the driving force behind this horrific massacre, and the enduring legacy of white 'justice' that continues to haunt First Nations peoples to this day.