More recently, another historian concluded that the rumours relating to a massacre are founded in fact, and that some form of punitive action did take place on the cliffs of Waterloo Bay, but that it had been embellished into a myth.

The deaths of the European settlers killed in the lead-up to the clash have been memorialised to some extent; in 2017 the Elliston District Council erected a memorial to acknowledge what occurred.

In March 1839, European settlers arrived from Adelaide, the capital of the colony of South Australia, to establish Port Lincoln on the east coast of the Eyre Peninsula.

Initially these revolved around keeping them at a distance using threats of violence, but they soon escalated to terrorising Aboriginal people to stop them interfering with stock and other property, tactics which sometimes resulted in violent clashes.

[2] Between June 1848 and May 1849, there were a series of incidents between settlers and resident Aboriginal people in the Elliston district, located 169 kilometres (105 mi) northwest of Port Lincoln.

[5] According to official records, on 27 May 1849, stores were taken from a hut on Thomas Cooper Horn's station and a hutkeeper and shepherd were threatened by Aboriginal people, who left with the goods they had taken.

[7] On 14 August 1880, an account of the events of the late 1840s on the Eyre Peninsula, written by the adventurer, journalist and preacher Henry John Congreve, was published in the Adelaide Observer, a weekly newspaper, as "A Reminiscence of Port Lincoln".

[11] The next account of the 1848–49 events in the Elliston district was a short story called "Doctor" written by the author Ellen Liston,[12] and published in the Adelaide Observer of 17 June 1882.

[11] Foster, Hosking and Nettelbeck note that the Government Resident's clerk reported on 16 May 1849 that three parties of volunteers were out looking for the Aboriginal people responsible for the Beevor and Easton murders.

In the first case, Liston's story was reprinted with the removal of three paragraphs—one about "troublesome blacks", another about the protagonist's sense of a "vast and terrible stillness", and the third about the "hands" conducting a "crusade against the natives".

Beviss claimed to have been told about the massacre by several people, including Hamp's son, as well as James Geharty, one of the police officers involved in investigating the murders.

Foster, Hosking and Nettelbeck have identified several inconsistencies in Beviss' account: Geharty did not name Waterloo Bay; Beviss named Easton's husband as being involved in the drive against the Aboriginal people, but James Easton went to Adelaide after his wife's murder and never returned; there is no evidence that the government sanctioned the raising of a force; and if 160 men participated in the drive, the authors question why no first-hand accounts of the massacre exist.

According to several accounts, Hamp's son was also involved in spreading the story of his father's death, including the episode of the head in the camp oven, and that he was the one who discovered the body.

[22] In 1936, the historian James Dugald Somerville wrote a series of articles in the Port Lincoln Times regarding early settler life on the Eyre Peninsula, in which he concluded that "it is a certainty that the Waterloo Bay 'massacre', as pictured by H.J.C.

[28] For many years, Aboriginal people from the west coast of South Australia have retold the story of a massacre at Elliston as part of their oral history.

It was intended that the cairn would be part of a national mourning campaign by Aboriginal people, timed to coincide with the bicentenary of the landing of Captain James Cook at Botany Bay in New South Wales in 1770.

John Moriarty, the deputy president of SAAPA, said that "the Elliston massacre was part of the history of the West Coast Aboriginal population, despite strenuous efforts by the relatives of the whites involved to discredit what is a well-known fact".

[31] In December 1971, a small granite memorial to Hamp was erected at the site of his hut, and in the early 1970s the locations of events leading up the alleged massacre were marked by P. J. Baillie.

[37][38] The Elliston council's work to acknowledge the massacre through the memorial was recognised in the 2018 National Local Government Awards in the "Promoting Indigenous Recognition" category.

[39] The mayor who presided over the sometimes rancorous process through which the memorial was established, Kym Callaghan, later said that he was very proud that the massacre had been properly recognised, and observed that "it's like a big dark cloud has been lifted off the town".

[41] According to Foster, Hosking and Nettelbeck, the most rigorous inquiries into the alleged massacre have been made by four professional and amateur historians, A. T. Saunders, Somerville, Baillie, and Greg Charter.

Saunders was the Register journalist who engaged with Beviss in the pages of that newspaper in 1926, and relied on the official records made by the Government Resident and police inspector, which do not support the massacre story.

Somerville examined the limited records held by the South Australian Archives, and concluded in 1936 that there was no formal evidence of a massacre, and that the confrontation at Horn's hut precipitated the "myth".

In 1989, Charter re-examined the archival evidence, and concluded that it "appears likely that the rumours relating to the Elliston Massacre have a foundation in fact, and that some form of punitive action did take place on the cliffs of Waterloo Bay, upon which an exaggerated myth had developed".

[33] Foster, Hosking and Nettelbeck conclude that whether or not the scale of the bloodshed equaled the massacre described in some versions of the story, the fact that it continues to be retold reflects a "deep unease about the communal memory of frontier history" in South Australia.