Australia Day, January 26, 1838. On a remote stream in northern New South Wales soon known as Waterloo Creek, a party of Mounted Police and convict stockmen under Major J. W. Nunn marks the occasion by massacring up to 300 Aborigines. Late in February a new Governor, George Gipps, arrives determined to introduce a new deal for the Aborigines and orders an inquiry into the atrocity.<BR>Three months later, stockmen in the same area slaughter twenty-eight Aborigines at Henry Dangar's Myall Creek station. Gipps has the perpetrators rounded up and in December 1838 seven of them are hanged, the first time in the colony's history whites have paid the supreme penalty for killing blacks.<BR>The white backlash sends Gipps reeling. The Waterloo Creek inquiry proceeds in obscurity, ending in the complete exoneration of Nunn and his troopers. Step by step, Gipps abandons his humanitarian policy towards the blacks under the relentless pressure of the squatters for permanent tenure of the land they have seized from its indigenous owners.<BR>Waterloo Creek is a comprehensive and intricately drawn account of the dramatic events of 1838, against the background of the fate of the Aborigines of south-eastern Australia generally in the first fifty years of the European invasion. At its centre is the story of the whites' rapacious grabbing of the land. In its pursuit, morality and law are disregarded, the well-meaning Gipps broken and humiliated, and genocide committed, condoned and even encouraged.