A new online mapping service has revealed gory details of an Aboriginal massacre at the hands of early settlers in Minnamurra.
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A Dapto property owner, a Yallah property manager and seven labourers and convicts killed more than six Aboriginal people on the banks of the Minnamurra River on October 1, 1818.
The victims were camping by the river when the assailants launched their attack.
The settlers fired long-barrelled guns and used slashing swords and knives attached to long sticks to kill the Aboriginal people.
Allegedly the settlers were trying to recover two muskets that had been lent to the Aboriginal people living there.
It is the only massacre in the Kiama region recorded on the map, as historians build on the project.
So far the Newcastle University project has documented 150 massacres resulting in at least 6000 deaths in the early years of the colony.
Most happened at dawn with a surprise attack on an Aboriginal camp where people "simply couldn't defend themselves", said University of Newcastle historian Professor Lyndall Ryan, who has been developing the online digital map for nearly four years.
By the time the project is completed in several years, she expects it will find that nearly 15,000 people were killed in massacres (defined as where six people or more died).
This doesn't include smaller attacks, estimated by some academics to bring the death toll to more than 30,000 from 1788 until the 1940s.