In October 1861 the politician Horatio Wills led an enormous settler train, more than 10,000 sheep and a line of bullock wagons, onto Gayiri land in Central Queensland to establish a cattle station at Cullin-la-ringo, without seeking permission from the people whose country it was. Tensions were already high: a neighbouring squatter had wrongly accused Gayiri men of stealing cattle and had several killed over it.
On 17 October, Aboriginal people who had been passing through the camp all day attacked, killing nineteen of the twenty-five settlers present, including Wills himself. Only a handful escaped, among them his teenage son Tom Wills, later a celebrated cricketer and co-founder of Australian rules football.
