For latest emergency updates Click Here

Bluff Rock is significant to the local people of the Tenterfield area as this place is where the first conflict between first settlers & a local Aboriginal group believed to be either the Jukembal or Ngarabal people had occurred in the early 1840’s.

There are conflicting records of the 1844 massacre, but it is said that a shepherd named Robinson was murdered by Aborigines on the Irby Station at Bolivia. The Aborigines fled to the rock, chased by a group of four white men who caught them and threw them from the top, killing most of the tribe and injuring the remainder.

The various ways in which we understand and tell history as well as the multiple variations on the ‘truth’ of an event are explored in brilliant detail in Katrina M Schlunke’s book Bluff Rock: Autobiography of a Massacre.