According to Michael Rowland, an authority on the Woppaburra writing in part to reply to the skepticism about reports of genocide advanced by Keith Windschuttle, the first visit of whites to the island, in 1865, occasioned a massacre of seven/eight members of the tribe: not mentioned in the report of the expedition, which spoke of an incident in which the group had saved a fleeing Aboriginal woman after she fell into the sea and injured herself, this or perhaps an earlier occasion of slaughter, was pointed out by tribal people later, who showed a hundred-yard line pitted with the skeletal remains of the Woppaburra who had been killed,[9] and several males, accused of killing some sheep, were transported off the terrain, to Yeppoon, where the local tribes viewed them with hostility.
The then lessee however stated that a full 30 had been removed, at their request, to the mainland, and relocated, after landing at a place 10 miles south of Cape Manifold, at the Water Park Native Reserve, while leaving only two women behind.
[11] According to testimony given to Walter Roth, however, some whites and mainland blacks had descended on the island, and hunted up all the Woppaburra women and children they could find, and had them transported back to the coast.
[14] Reports from the mid-1880s indicate that some Woppaburra remained on the island, used as cheap labour on the sheep-runs, men and women whipped along as, harnassed to a plough, they were forced to furrow the soil, and fed tidbits thrown their way by whites.
[12] Something akin to frontier warfare, involving not only shootings, poisonings, and being driven into the sea, but also theft of their women by Japanese pearlers, appears to have struck the Woppaburra, according to the tales handed down by descendants of the tribe in both Yeppoon and Emu Park.
At the same time, in the late 1890s, a dispute over territorial competence arose between the northern protector of Queensland's aboriginal peoples, and his southern colleague Archibald Meston.
Roth insisted they not be dislocated from the islands, and was thought to favour the lessee's interests, while Meston was shocked by the degraded conditions to which the Woppaburra had been reduced in the introduced pastoralist environment.
Al-li means "water" and refers to both the symbolism of deep grieving and its essential life-giving and healing properties, in the form of rain and the ways it moves through the landscape, following the tracks of Moonda Nghadda.