Today’s Stories from our Past

A podcast about Australian family stories and social history.Everyone has a story that we want to tell.

Over the past 170 years, the story of the Mark’s Murders has been told to Australians in greatly different ways, depending on the era. At the time, the murders were recorded in detail in official records. At that time, all Aboriginal people were known individually by name. Soon after the murders, a newspaper report falsely claimed that James Mark’s son was roasted alive and eaten by cannibals. This salacious report was perpetuated for the next 100-plus years during the period when ‘white triumphalism’ was taught in schools. In the last 40 years, ‘conflict studies’ have told the story from both sides but have been accused of exaggerating the number of Aboriginal deaths.