Elliston on the coast of South Australia is a small town carrying a big burden.

It’s a community of 1,400 people at Waterloo Bay, on the rugged Eyre peninsula, seven hours west of Adelaide.

The cliffs are so steep here that the only access to the beach below is via a single line of rope fixed to the rock. It’s remote, unspoiled and slightly dangerous – a surfer’s paradise.

However breathtaking the scenery might be, it was here in 1849 that at least 14 Wirangu and Kokatha men, women and children were herded to their deaths. The Wirangu people say it was more like 200.

Attempts to acknowledge these atrocities were rebuffed by successive councils. In 1970 Elliston rejected a plan to build a cairn as a memorial, saying there was no proof a massacre had taken place.

In 1978 Elliston marked its centenary by publishing a history, “Across the bar to Waterloo bay”. A chapter called “The Elliston Massacre, 1869” gives one version of how the killings began: after a series of frontier clashes, the settler John Hamp was murdered. Police and local men assembled a “punitive force to punish the natives”.

Written testimony says it was “not an easy task” for the posse “to search the bush thoroughly, and the chase was necessarily slow”. They eventually found the Wirangu in open country near the bay. “Several natives” were shot, others went over the cliff.

“All they wanted to do was live on their country like they’d done for thousands of years and they lost their lives for it. Our people still grieve when things like this happen. It’s in our heart, what happened, we still feel it.” said Jack Johncock.

For 170 years these people have been waiting for that terrible atrocity to be acknowledged and now that a monument stands in rememberance, it’s like a big dark cloud has been lifted off the town.

“There are thousands of people around the country watching this, and now it’s gone worldwide. It’s a healing story. It’s a good story.”