The massacre made history as one of the first times perpetrators of violence against Aboriginal people were found, put on trial and executed.

New England Regional Art Museum director Robert Heather met NSW Senior Crown Prosecutor Mark Tedeschi at the annual reconciliation event at Myall Creek.

“it’s a big reconciliation event, it used to be a big secret where nobody out there knew anything about it and nobody wanted to know anything about it – a group of people from the local community have built a memorial there and they have this event every year,” Mr Heather said.

“Mark was walking next to me and we started to have a chat, as it turned out he wrote a book on the Myall Creek Massacre.”

NSW Senior crown prosecutor Mark Tedeschi has written a book called Murder at Myall Creek and will now present a lecture at NERAM on the events that transpired.

“The people who worked on Myall Creek Station got along very well with the Aboriginal people, the invading stockmen who came to murder them had their cattle disrupted and had attacks by some Aboriginal people on them,” Mr Tedeschi said.

“But they didn’t care whether these people were responsible or not – their attitude was that because they were blacks they’ll kill them and people won’t find about about them.”

Mr Tedeschi urged all Australians to go to one of the memorial ceremonies at Myall Creek station.

“It’s a very moving ceremony, you have descendants of all the parties coming together in what to me is the quintessential act of reconciliation between blacks and whites,” he said.

“What inspired me to write this one is that I found out about the prosecutor John Hubert Plunkett and I did some research and found out about all the civil rights and institutions that he was responsible for creating in Australia.

“He was responsible for more of those reforms than just about anybody else in our history and yet he’s hardly known – I think he can justifiably be called the Martin Luther King of Australia.”

At the two lectures Mr Tedeschi will give, a member of the Aboriginal community will have the opportunity to respond and he hopes that it is another step toward reconciliation.

“It’s about time that somebody recognised the attempted genocide of Aboriginal people in Australia throughout the 19^th century because a lot of people aren’t aware of the hundred of massacres of Aboriginal people that occurred in this country.”