Konongwootong has always been close to my heart as we raised our 4 children in the old WW1 returned Soldier Settlement Konongwootong North Primary School No 4362, which is still owned by my daughter.

The Konongwootong district, located in the Western District of Victoria on Gunditjmara Country, occupies a significant and difficult place in the history of the Australian frontier. It is a landscape where violence is not only plausible but consistent with broader regional patterns, and where memory, material recognition, and fragmentary documentation intersect. The site now associated with the Konongwootong Reservoir, formally recognised for its Aboriginal cultural heritage values and recorded on the Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Register, stands as a focal point for this intersection.¹

Long before the arrival of Europeans, Konongwootong formed part of a managed and inhabited cultural landscape. For thousands of years, the area functioned as a seasonal wetland system, with winter pools and more permanent water sources sustained by springs and soaks during drier months.² These conditions supported a stable and productive environment, providing food, water, fibres, medicinal resources, and shelter. The Konongwootong Gunditj people lived within this system, maintaining cultural practices tied to the rhythms of the landscape.³ As elsewhere in the Budj Bim region, this was not wilderness but country structured through long-term use and knowledge.

This continuity was disrupted in the late 1830s with the arrival of European pastoralists seeking to establish large sheep runs across the Western District. Their occupation of land was not neutral. It involved the assertion of control over water, pasture, and movement, and in practice required the removal or suppression of Aboriginal presence.⁴ Conflict emerged quickly and took on a recognisable form across the district: livestock spearing by Aboriginal groups as an assertion of economic resistance, followed by organised settler reprisals.

One such reprisal occurred in March 1840 in the area known as the Fighting Hills, near present-day Casterton. Settlers, armed with firearms, pursued Gunditjmara men following the taking of sheep. The resulting encounter was profoundly unequal. Contemporary and later accounts suggest that several dozen Aboriginal men and boys were killed, while settler losses were minimal.⁵ This episode is among the clearer examples of organised lethal force applied under the language of retribution.

Within a short period—traditionally understood as occurring within weeks—violence extended to Konongwootong itself. The event now commonly referred to as the Fighting Waterholes massacre is associated with the wetland system that once occupied the site of the present reservoir. Local historical accounts and interpretive material indicate that a group of Gunditjmara people, including men, women, and children, were surrounded and killed in a location where the terrain formed a natural enclosure.⁶ The amphitheatre-like character of the ground is repeatedly noted, suggesting that the physical environment constrained movement and contributed to the outcome.

Estimates of those killed vary, but commonly refer to several dozen individuals. The absence of precise numbers reflects the broader problem of documentation. No definitive contemporary report has been identified that records the event in detail, names participants, or establishes an exact date. Instead, the evidence is cumulative: oral tradition, local historical reconstruction, and later commemorative recognition.

The question of burial further illustrates the fragmentary nature of the record. The location of those killed was not formally documented at the time. However, accounts from the mid-twentieth century refer to the exposure of human remains following significant flooding in 1946.⁷ These remains were reportedly collected and reinterred by a local resident, indicating both the persistence of physical traces and the absence of earlier formal recognition.

Despite this evidentiary uncertainty, the Konongwootong site has undergone a process of historical acknowledgement. In 2014, a commemorative area, referred to as a Quiet Place, was established at the reservoir.⁸ This landscape intervention was designed not as a monument in the traditional sense, but as a site for reflection. It incorporates a walking path, interpretive signage, and seating positioned to overlook the wetland area. The design draws attention to the natural amphitheatre associated with the historical account, allowing visitors to engage with the spatial dimensions of the event.

Joining the Winda Mara dancers are (from left) Wannon Water chairman John Vogels, Southern Grampians Shire mayor Albert Calvano, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs Tim Bull, and Nationals Candidate for Lowan Emma Kealy. The memorial was established in 2014 by Wannon Water in collaboration with the Gunditj Mirring Aboriginal Corporation to commemorate the Konongwootong Gunditj people and the massacres that occurred there in 1840. Photo Courtesy of the Warrnambool Standard.

The creation of this site was the result of collaboration between Gunditjmara Elders and organisations, including Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation, alongside state agencies and regional authorities.⁹ This partnership is significant. It situates the Konongwootong narrative within both Indigenous knowledge and contemporary heritage practice, reinforcing its status as a recognised historical site rather than an unverified tradition.

The Konongwootong material therefore rests on a layered evidentiary base. Oral histories preserve the memory of violence and its location. Local research has assembled these accounts alongside fragmentary documentary references. Material commemoration, through plaques, signage, and the Quiet Place, anchors this understanding in the landscape itself. What remains limited is the formal colonial archive, which is consistent with the broader pattern of frontier violence in the Western District.

Historians of the frontier have long noted that such violence was frequently obscured in contemporary records. Terms such as “dispersal” masked lethal outcomes, while incidents occurring beyond administrative centres were often underreported or omitted entirely.¹⁰ In this context, the absence of a detailed primary account at Konongwootong is not anomalous. Rather, it reflects the conditions under which violence was enacted and recorded.

Environmental factors further support the plausibility of the event as described. The Western District landscape, characterised by broken basalt, wetlands, and confined approaches, favoured ambush and limited avenues of escape.¹¹ Water sites in particular acted as focal points for movement and encounter. A wetland basin enclosed by rising ground, as described at Konongwootong, would have presented both a resource and a risk, particularly under conditions of pursuit.

The central issue is therefore not whether violence occurred, but how it should be represented. The convergence of oral tradition, physical evidence, and formal commemoration places Konongwootong on firmer ground than unsubstantiated rumour. At the same time, the lack of a definitive contemporary account requires caution. The most defensible interpretation is to treat the Fighting Waterholes event as a probable massacre grounded in strong local evidence and recognised through collaborative heritage practice, while acknowledging the limits imposed by the surviving archive.¹²

In this sense, Konongwootong is both specific and representative. It marks a particular place where violence is understood to have occurred, and it illustrates a broader historical condition in which many acts of frontier violence remain only partially recoverable. The Quiet Place established at the reservoir does not resolve the historical record, but it ensures that the event is neither forgotten nor reduced to silence. It stands as an acknowledgement that the landscape itself retains memory, even where the archive does not.¹³

FOOTNOTES

1. Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Register, entry for Konongwootong cultural heritage place.
2. Environmental and cultural description of Konongwootong wetland system, interpretive material, Konongwootong Reservoir site.
3. Richard Broome, Aboriginal Victorians: A History Since 1800 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005), 28–35.
4. Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006), 86–90.
5. Jan Critchett, A Distant Field of Murder: Western District Frontiers 1834–1848 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1990), 120–125.
6. Local interpretive signage, Konongwootong Reservoir; regional historical accounts of the Fighting Waterholes incident.
7. Coleraine district historical accounts of 1946 flooding and recovery of human remains; local records relating to T. J. Fitzgerald.
8. Interpretive material, “Quiet Place,” Konongwootong Reservoir, established 2014.
9. Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation et al., project collaboration records for Konongwootong commemorative site.
10. Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, 121–125; Critchett, A Distant Field of Murder, 114–118.
11. Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2011), 241–260.
12. Bain Attwood, Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2005), 67–72.
13. Ian D. Clark, Scars in the Landscape: A Register of Massacre Sites in Western Victoria, 1803–1859 (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1995), 1–5.