Deconstructing the Myth of Murdering Creek li Colonial Genocide: the Massacre at Murdering Creek © Ray Gibbons (2015) Abstract: Australia is populated with violent place names, a shadowland of myth. This is the story of toponymic Murdering Creek, on the southern side of Lake Weyba near Noosa in Queensland’s southeast. We will assess the alleged massacre at Murdering Creek as a potential type instance of the Australian genocidal process. In our forensic examination of the Murdering Creek massacre myth, we find that it is supported by an actual event that, on the balance of evidence, took place in 1864 on a 23,000 acre pastoral station called Yandina Run, between the Maroochy River and Lake Weyba. We determine that the massacre was carried out by local pastoral workers and at least one timbergetter. The motive seems to have been a belief in white supremacy, and a pathological desire to remove the Aboriginals, who objected to a homestead being built near a sacred bora in 1862. An unkown number of Aboriginals were murdered while in canoes at the mouth of the Creek and into the shallow foreshore of the lake, where they had been inveigled by a ruse. The massacre was enabled by the murderous and racist policies of the newly installed Herbert Government, the first Government of Queensland. Herbert assumed the office of Government in 1859, and was sworn into power in 1860. He took the title of premier and colonial secretary, which included Aboriginal affairs. He is considered the founder of Queensland. During Herbert’s long term, there is no legislative evidence that he considered the human rights of dispossessed Aboriginals. His priorities were economic, and Aboriginals were an encumbrance. Herbert’s Government introduced Aboriginal dispersal policies that legitimised extermination. Britain was a co-conspirator. Britain supplied the weaponry, strategic governance, immigrants and maritime mercantile support. In our findings, Murdering Creek therefore becomes a type instance of a violent State sponsored process that saw the destruction of Aboriginal society across a multiplicity of other Murdering Creek type events in Queensland and across Australia. Meticulous effort has been used to investigate this particular myth, because other researchers may be able to reuse the originating syncretic methods and investigative tools that can help them further decode Australia’s mythical past. Not the largely confected, triumphal past of heroic pastoralism, as it tamed the land for economic gain. No, it is the violent and defiantly racist past that many of us choose to forget, including that at Murdering Creek. It is the invasive pattern of armed dispossession, the process of occupation that formed the political uses of Australian genocide, where economic imperatives outweighed humanitarian considerations. We ignore the past to our cost.