Caledon Bay crisis facts for kids
The Caledon Bay crisis, refers to a series of killings at Caledon Bay in the Northern Territory of Australia during 1932–34, referred to in the press of the day as Caledon Bay murder(s). Five Japanese trepang fishers were killed by Aboriginal Australians of the Yolngu people. A police officer investigating the deaths, Albert McColl, was subsequently killed. Shortly afterwards, two white men went missing on Woodah Island. With some of the white community alarmed by these events, a punitive expedition was proposed by Northern Territory Police to "teach the blacks a lesson".
However, it was feared that a punitive expedition would lead to an event similar to the 1928 Coniston massacre. A party from the Church Missionary Society travelled to Arnhem Land and persuaded Dhakiyarr Wirrpanda and three other men, sons of a Yolngu elder, Wonggu, to return to Darwin with them for trial.
In Darwin in April 1934, Dhakiyarr was sentenced to execution for the murder of McColl. The three other men were sentenced to 20 years' hard labour. After a seven months’ investigation, the Federal Government freed the three men imprisoned for the killings.
On appeal to the High Court of Australia, in a case known as Tuckiar v The King, Dhakiyarr's sentence was quashed in November 1934, and he was released from jail, but disappeared on his way home.
The historian Henry Reynolds has suggested that the Caledon Bay crisis was a decisive moment in the history of Aboriginal-European relations.
