Who was the author of he Booandik Tribe of South Australian Aborigines hesitant about naming?
In 1880, while Brown was still alive, the lay missionary Christina Smith wrote a book, The Booandik Tribe of South Australian Aborigines, which was published in Adelaide. It included memoirs from her time in the Rivoli Bay district, some 50 kilometres (31 mi) southeast of Guichen Bay. One of these was about an Aboriginal boy called Wergon, whom she had adopted in the 1840s. Wergon had converted to Christianity and went on several journeys to try to convert the local Aboriginal people. One of these evangelical visits was to the country of the Wattatonga tribe, a group whose traditional lands included the newly established Avenue Range Station. He returned from this trip to tell Smith that eleven of the tribe had been massacred by two white men. Wergon had persuaded a witness whose parents had apparently been killed in the massacre to return with him. According to Wergon, "the white men had shown no mercy to the grey-headed old man or to the helpless infant on its mother's breast", and the apparent motive for the massacre was the killing of sheep belonging to a settler in the Guichen Bay district. Smith's account did not include how the massacre was carried out, but did include the details that it was investigated, the bodies of the victims were burnt, and the murderer was discharged for lack of evidence. Smith did not name the settlers. In their 2001 book, the historians Robert Foster, Rick Hosking and Amanda Nettelbeck considered this unsurprising, given that Brown was alive and living nearby at the time Smith's book was published. While circumspect about naming Brown, Smith essentially recounted important details of the massacre in her book published over thirty years after it occurred.
Brown