Kate Auty in conversation with Professor Lynette Russell

O’Leary of the Underworld is a powerful investigation that reveals the deep injustices inflicted on Aboriginal people in the Kimberley in the 1920s. To be launched by Professor Lynette Russell, this is the distressing story of how in 1926, a posse of police officers and white civilians murdered at least twenty Oombulgurri people at Forrest River in the Kimberley. After the massacre, a conspiracy of silence descended. One of the perpetrators was Bernard O’Leary, a former soldier whose land holding was known as ‘the underworld’. At the 1927 Royal Commission into the killings, O’Leary was portrayed by his lawyer as a simple honest backwoodsman who was framed. In this powerful account, Kate Auty argues that O’Leary was in fact ‘vicious, brazen and a bullshitter’, with ‘a propensity for brutality’. Although never charged, he played a leading role in the murders, and his duplicitous testimony thwarted the commission’s work.

In electric prose, Auty depicts O’Leary as a merciless killer, while the apparatus that concealed his crimes is portrayed with great realism and clarity. Driven by both forensic and moral judgement, the book exposes the injustices embedded in Australian settlement history, and the culture of denial that has prevented truth-telling in this country.

Free, but bookings are essential.