Angepena Waters

An Australian academic has created an interactive map showing sites of massacres that occurred during the frontier wars.  

The map can be accessed as a link in the newspaper article here . 

The massacres (and reprisals) were an inevitable part of the unsettlement of Australian First Nations people, of their forcible and violent dispossession from Country.  Angepena, in the Flinders is not on the map yet, but should be.  See my earlier (2007) post:  The Angepena Atrocities here

In 2011 I wrote this poem about Angepena:

Angepena Waters

Angepena waters were always just there

For all of the yura to share

And the birds and the creatures

Danced through its virgin features

As the yura chanted the songlines

Angepena waters are sparkling in the sun

But white men took the land for their cattle to run

And for them it makes more sense

Than to build a big long fence

That the yura are dispersed with the gun 

Though yura men lay dead

Their families had not fled

They still huddled near Angepena water

So the stockmen took whips and slashed their breasts

With great rips

And cut the heads and the backs of their children

At Angepena waters there were genocidal slaughters

So that cattle could drink without disturbance

With the water holes mud

Mixed with cow shit and blood

Angepena’s a shame job for whitey.

19/12/11