“Across the colonies, decade after decade, witnesses to massacres almost never came forward. Why would they risk everything going to a magistrate more than likely too gutless to take over? The Myall Creek prosecution was remarkable from the first, for the white man who saw those bodies burning on the pyre rode down to a good magistrate in the Hunter Valley, who set the machinery of law in action before anyone in Sydney heard of the slaughter. But after Myall Creek a curious but brutally effective omert`a was imposed in the bush, a code that let so much be written in the papers about massacres but saw nothing done about them in the courts”.
David Marr, Killing for Country, A Family Story, Black Inc, 2023, p. 207-8
