‘They thought they could hide’: the Aboriginal tracker who brought massacre perpetrators to trial

James Noble performs a christening at Forrest River mission in Western Australia in 1925, a year before he uncovered evidence of a massacre there. Photograph: State Library of Western Australia

In August 1926, on the banks of the east Kimberley’s Forrest River, an Aboriginal deacon found a pile of charred bone fragments.

The Rev James Noble, famed for his tracking skills, had been sent to investigate whether Aboriginal residents of the Forrest River mission had been shot by the Western Australian police.