Lady of the Lake is the story of Gunditjmara Elder Aunty Iris Lovett-Gardiner and her life at Lake Condah in the western districts of Victoria. Here Aunty Iris recalls massacres that occured and the places at which they happened.

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TRANSCRIPT

People don’t really realize what happened in those days an’ if the truth would come out an’ people would understand what happened to our people then this feeling of sorrow that we still got in our hearts when we come to a place like this and see the desecration that’s been done an’ the way that the people were herded together like…like…sheep or animals, with no piece of humanity there to show who they were or anything else an’ I think that’s a great pity because…they used the land the way it should have been used an’ they lived the life that nothing was desecrated or…you know…pulled to pieces or anything else…not like it is now. They’ve gone and fenced off…an’ places are fenced and everything. The old people didn’t tell us everything…you know, those sort of things. I know my granny Lovett, she was only a little girl an’ her mother an’ her hid in the swamp…must have been over here…when all that was going on…an’ that’s how they got saved…she got saved. So there was things around here…they must have seen a massacre. Granny Lovett was saying that her an’ her mother hid in the swamp…see, she’ was only a baby sort of…an’ they hid there until everything was over. Oh, there was hundreds of people died in the massacres which…but what I think you can say is, there was massacres all over the place but they probably weren’t recorded, because they had a shooting board that they had with Aboriginal people…they went out an’ they shot ‘em an’ they come from every where to have a shoot against the Aboriginal race…an’ they shot women, kids and everything else…an’ that wasn’t…you know they wouldn’t say how many they shot, they wouldn’t put that down, because it was sport to them, it was like shooting animals…and that’s why massacres must have been everywhere, not only in one spot, because I’m sure that it happened all over the place…I know it happened all over Victoria, that people were shot down and things like that…but here I think was the worse because the Eumerella War took a lot of people away, you know, with fighting and things like that…but I’m proud of my people…how they stood up against the gun…you know.