Fatal Collisions

In 1849, James Brown, a South Australian pastoralist, was charged with the shooting deaths of nine Aboriginal people. Unable to find witnesses, the crown was forced to drop the case even though the magistrate was convinced of his guilt. Two generations later, a glowing biography of Brown's life noted merely that he was involved in a change of poisoning an Aboriginal man, but emerged from the trial with a clean slate. Why had the story changed so much: form shooting to poisoning, from nine victims to one, from evading trial to being found innocent? Fatal Collisions is about violence on the South Australian frontier and the ways in which it has been remembered in Anglo-Australian accounts of the past.