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Event mentions

• Massacre
  1 Jul 1824 – 31 Jul 1824 — Cudgegong River at Dabee
  George Henry Cox described how there were ‘very many sad scenes’ when ‘a war nearly of extermination was declared’. He recalled that ‘an immense number of the natives, men, women and children, were slaughtered at Mudgee and amongst them poor old Aaron our guide. He was shot in the long reach of water at Dabee’. At the time, in mid-August, just before martial law was declared, questions were asked about ‘more particulars … as to the death of Ering [Aaron] and others’. ‘Candid’ asked the Gazette to confirm if ‘sixty or seventy’ people, rather than the five reported, had died ‘in an affair which took place at or near Mudjee’ and whether ‘old Erin [Aaron]’ was ‘dead or alive’ and ‘if dead, in what way did he die?’ There were no replies to those questions in the Gazette. As we have seen, according to George Henry Cox, Aaron was shot in a massacre on the upper Cudgegong River, suggesting that 60-70 people were indeed killed in this massacre.
  Source: Cox, ‘History of Mudgee’, pp. 44, 46. Henry Cox quoted in George Cox, ‘Mudgee in the early days’, p. 5. Peter Swain thinks the ‘long reach of water at Dabee’ would be between the current ‘Dabee’ property and where the river begins to wind as the valley narrows. Peter Swain, interview and sites tour, 28 January 2021. Gazette, 12 August 1824, p. 4, Gazette, 19 August 1824, p. 4.