Ronnie Gorrie would never visit the site at Brodbribb River in East Gippsland where her people were massacred, but she says it’s important others learn the truth about what happened there.
Today, few Victorians know about this slaughter of as many as 150 people â a crime for which no one was arrested. There are no plaques at the now peaceful spot on a farm 40 kilometres south of Sale and 200 kilometres east of Melbourne.
But there are more than a dozen monuments in Gippsland to pastoralist Angus McMillan, who is widely believed to have led this and other massacres. Until 2018, a federal electorate was named after him.
Also in the early 1840s, at Tambo Crossing, north-east of Bairnsdale, Mr Thorpeâs great-great-great grandfather, William Thorpe, and another boy survived a massacre of about 70 Gunnai people (committed by perpetrators that Aboriginesâ âchief protectorâ George Augustus Robinson termed âChristiansâ) by hiding in a log.