A memorial gathering for the Dharawal, Darug, and Gundungurra people who died during the Appin massacre will be held at the Cataract Dam south of Sydney on Sunday.
In the early hours of 17 April 1816, Governor Lachlan Macquarie ordered the military to apprehend Indigenous people and shoot any who resisted.
Aunty Glenda Chalker from the Winga Myamly Reconciliation Group is a descendant of one of the few survivors of the massacre, and has noticed a rise in attendance at the memorial service, held annually on the Sunday nearest to the actual massacre date of April 17th to remember those who died in the tragedy of Australia’s Frontier Wars
“When the Winga Myamly reconciliation group got together to there was only a handful of people, on Sunday we could have anything from one thousand or more,” she said.
This year is the first memorial service since the massacre site has been listed on the State Heritage register.
Chalker said that the listing is significant to her.
“The service is held at the Cataract Dam because we have not had access to where the actual massacre took place.
Hopefully in the future we will be able to move the service to where the massacre actually took place, that’s going to take a little while yet,” she said.
Chalker says that acknowledgement of the massacre a significant step in the Truth-Telling Process.
“It’s important to everybody and especially myself since it was my family that was involved in all of this.
It’s all about Truth-telling and I think that there is more and more Truth-telling in Australia today and for people to understand the people that were lost in massacres just like this one all across Australia,” she said.
Listen to the full interview with Auntie Glenda Chalker Here:
