The massacre of Running Waters was the killing of 80 to 100 Arrernte (formerly known as Aranda) men, women and children of the Southern Aranda language group of Aboriginal Australians by a raiding party of 50 to 60 Matuntara warriors in 1875. The massacre took place at Irbmangkara, a permanent water stretch of the Finke River about south-west of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory of Australia.
The Matuntara planned the attack as a punishment for an act of sacrilege by the neighbouring southern Arrernte.
The account of what occurred at Irbmangkara is based on the writings of Lutheran anthropologist, linguist and genealogist Carl Strehlow, but the people of Hermannsburg have stated that the events have remained a shaping factor in the area's local politics.
Events
The massacre was triggered thanks to a middle-aged man called Kalejika, who belonged to a Central Aranda local group. Kalejika paid a visit to Irbmangkara, and then told some Upper Southern Aranda men that Ltjabakuka, the aged and highly respected ceremonial chief of Irbmangkara, together with some of his assistant elders, had committed sacrilege by giving uninitiated boys men's blood to drink from a shield into which it had been poured for ritual purposes. Sacrilege was an offence always punished by death.
According to historian Geoffrey Blainey, the party of Aboriginal warriors sent to avenge the sacrilege and selected Running Waters [as the place where the Southern Arrernte could be readily be surprised], "and timed their secret raid for... when their enemies were cooking their meals before making their beds on the ground".
Three parties of warriors, hidden among the bushes of the nearby mountain slopes and in the undergrowth in the river bed at their foot, were watching the men and women of Irbmangkara returning to their camp; the armed men [then]... rushed in, like swift dingoes upon flock of unsuspecting emus. Spears and boomerangs flew with deadly aim. Within a matter of minutes Ltjabakuka and his men were lying lifeless in their blood at their brush shelters.
Then the warriors turned their murderous attention to the women and older children, and either speared or clubbed them to death. Finally, according to the grim custom of warriors and avengers, they broke the limbs of the infants, leaving them to die "natural deaths". The final number of the dead could well have reached the high figure of from 80 to 100 men, women, and children. One of the Aranda women had merely pretended to be dead and escaped northward to raise the alarm.
As a small boy, Moses Tjalkabota was greatly affected by the massacre, given that two of his friends and their mother were killed in the raid, and he had himself witnessed the great clouds of smoke arising from the funeral pyres when the bodies were burnt the next day. Much later, his reminiscences of the killings were recorded and translated into English, and in some details, they are the same when describing the ruthlessness of the raid.
Sources
The first European explorers had arrived in this area in 1860 and, by 1872 to the east, the Overland Telegraph Line had been surveyed and constructed.
The massacre occurred in 1875, two years before the Germans set up their Lutheran mission at Hermannsburg in 1877. Tjalkabota, who was an Aboriginal translator for both Carl Strehlow (who led the mission from 1894 to 1922) and his son Ted Strehlow, was a young boy (6 to 9 years of age) at the time of the massacre and, according to researcher Peter Latz, "he recalls it [the massacre] in some detail".
Carl Strehlow's recordings of the massacre appear in his grandson John Strehlow's historical biography of this grandparents.
Ted Strehlow wrote a detailed account of the massacre in his 1969 book, Journey to Horseshoe Bend.
Aftermath and analysis
Strehlow wrote of the massacre as an example of an incompatibility in integrating Indigenous Australian customary law with the modern Australian legal system. He describes the capital punishment enacted against the Arrernte people who were unwitting in the crime as an unacceptably harsh punishment in the Australian legal mind and contrary to mens rea.