[1] In mid-October 1861, a party of squatters from the colony of Victoria, under Horatio Wills, set up a temporary tent camp to start the process of establishing a cattle station at Cullin-la-ringo, a property formed by amalgamating four blocks of land with a total area of 260 square kilometres (100 sq mi).

Wills's party, an enormous settlement train, including bullock wagons and more than 10,000 sheep, had set out from Brisbane eight months earlier.

Another contemporary account said the police "overtook a tribe of natives, shot down sixty or seventy, and ceased firing when their ammunition was expended".

Historians later estimated the number of dead as around 370 people, and an anonymous article in the Chicago Tribune was discovered in 2021 stating that Tom Wills had bragged about his participation in reprisal killings.

It was built from stone in order to reduce threats of fire and to act as a safe haven during any Aboriginal raid as a response to the Cullin-la-ringo massacre.

[11] The caption of The Wills Tragedy (an artwork by T. G. Moyle) reads: "The arrival of the neighbouring squatters and Mon collecting and burying the dead, after the attack by the blacks on H.R.

After his love interest is murdered in the Cullin-la-ringo massacre, Marrion considers getting revenge on her killers, but abandons the idea after talking to an Aboriginal friend named Talboora.

[12] The first scholarly assessment of the massacre, "From Hornet Bank to Cullin-la-Ringo", by Gordon Reid, was published by the Royal Historical Society of Queensland in 1981.