[1][4][5] In the 1830s white settlers were expanding into the northern area of the colony of New South Wales (New England), near the Gwydir River, the traditional territory of the Kamilaroi people.

[citation needed] John Henry Fleming, a free man from Mungie Bundie Run near Moree, gathered a group of armed men to respond.

[7][11] When William Hobbs, the manager of Myall Creek station, returned several days later and discovered the bodies, he counted up to twenty-eight (as they were beheaded and dismembered, he had difficulty determining the exact number).

Supported by Attorney General John Plunkett, Gipps ordered Police Magistrate Edward Denny Day at Muswellbrook to investigate the massacre.

He had initially refused to name any but, after learning that the massacre had been planned more than a week earlier to coincide with the absence of Hobbs, he agreed to identify the killers to the magistrate.

1)[14] – The station hutkeeper, George Anderson, was the only white witness and key for the prosecution, conducted by Attorney General Plunkett and Roger Therry as his junior counsel.

A letter to the editor of The Australian on 8 December 1838 alleged that one of the jurors had said privately that although he considered the men guilty of murder, he could not convict a white man of killing an Aboriginal person, purportedly saying: "I look on the blacks as a set of monkeys and the sooner they are exterminated from the face of the earth, the better.

The letter writer continued, "I leave you, Sir, and the community to determine on the fitness of this white savage to perform the office of a juryman under any circumstance".

I [Anderson] saw smoke in the same direction they went; this was soon after they went with the firesticks ... Fleming told Kilmeister to go up by-and-by and put the logs of wood together, and be sure that all [of the remains] was consumed ... the girls they left, and the two boys, and the child I sent away with 10 black fellows that went away in the morning ...

According to the indictment, the murder had been committed "by shooting with a pistol, cutting with a sword, and beating, casting into a fire, and keeping the child there until death ensued.

[21][22]This is not a case where any provocation has been given, which might have been pleaded in excuse for the deed… The murder was not confined to one man, but extended to many, including men, women, children, and babies hanging at their mothers’ breasts, in numbers not less than 30 human souls — slaughtered in cool blood.

In that hut the prisoners, unmoved by the tears, groans, and sighs, bound them with cords — fathers, mothers, and children indiscriminately – and carried them away to a short distance, when the scene of slaughter commenced, and stopped not until all were exterminated, with the exception of one woman.

I do not mention these circumstances to add to the agony of that moment, but to portray to those standing around the horrors which attended this merciless proceeding, in order, if possible, to avert similar consequences hereafter.

"[24]The Herald listed examples of alleged Aboriginal crimes, before continuing: "Are all these outrages to be enveloped in obscurity—is all this blood to be unavenged, and yet white men to be hanged for slaying blacks, perhaps in self-defence, perhaps in retaliation for injuries previously sustained?

"[25]The four remaining accused, Blake, Toulouse, Palliser and Lamb, were remanded until the next session to allow time for the main witness against them, an Aboriginal boy named Davey, to be prepared in order to take a Bible oath.

I have just returned from seeing the seven men all launched into eternity at the same moment it was an awful sight and has made me feel quite sick – I shall never forget it.John Henry Fleming, the leader of the massacre, was never captured.

He hid or was protected, either in the Hawkesbury district, on a relative's property inland from Moreton Bay, or in Van Diemen's Land (according to conflicting reports that remain unresolved).

The Sydney Herald was particularly strident, declaring in October 1838 that "the whole gang of black animals are not worth the money the colonists will have to pay for printing the silly documents on which we have already wasted too much time".

[17][32] In November 1838 the paper's editorial said if Aboriginal Australians, referred to as the "filthy, brutal cannibals of New Holland" and "ferocious savages",[33] attempt to destroy property or kill someone, "do to them as you would do to any white robbers or murderers — SHOOT THEM DEAD.

[35] The Australian published a poem by Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, "The Aboriginal Mother", on 13 December 1838, about a week after the seven men were found guilty, but several days before they were hanged.

As elsewhere in the colony, the Aboriginal people at times resisted the expanding invasion of their land by spearing sheep and cattle for food and sometimes attacking the stockmen's huts and killing the white men.

[citation needed] When Nunn returned to Sydney, many of the local squatters and stockmen continued the "drive" against the Aboriginal people, including the Myall Creek massacre.

[47][48][49] The Myall Creek massacre and the subsequent trial and hanging of some of the offenders had a profound effect on the "outside" settlers and their dealing with indigenous people throughout all sections the colonial Australian frontiers.

The Sydney Herald and the spokesmen for the settlers in the remote districts of New South Wales and Victoria, frequently leading men such as William Wentworth, typically classified the trial and execution of the offenders as "judicial murder".

[50][51] Similar opinions were voiced years later in Queensland, the most populated section of the continent in terms of indigenous people, where it was the subject of numerous statements in the then newly separated parliament.

[52] On 9 June 2023, ahead of the 185th anniversary of the massacre, The Sydney Morning Herald published an editorial that apologised for its part in "spreading racist views and misinformation while campaigning for the killers to escape justice".

It said that its disapproval of the death sentence for the 7 of the 12 men involved was "not due to a lack of evidence or genuine doubts over the integrity of any legal process, but because the perpetrators were white and the dead black".

It admitted that its coverage was out of step with other reporting at the time, and also apologised for other articles encouraging readers to kill Aboriginal people if they felt "threatened".

Witnesses William Hobbs, Thomas Foster, Andrew Burrowes and Edward Denny Day himself describe the massacre site without making any mention of a stockyard.

Hobbs stated in evidence to the Supreme Court that the stockyard was close to the huts whereas the massacre site was "about half a mile from my house in a westerly direction".