erase their names from the landscape.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Frank Hann (right) with his assistant Talbot. Photograph: Wikipedia

In these circumstances it would be unenlightened, retrograde and an insult to many Indigenous people to name a highway after one or both of the Hann brothers.

Among the cattle stations established by Frank Hann, who jointly owned other properties with William, was Lawn Hill. Frank Hann worked Lawn Hill with another pastoralist, Melbourne Grammar-educated Jack Watson, who would later inflict the most sadistic violence in lands that would become part of the Northern Territory.

In 1882 the pioneering explorer and naturalist Emily “Carrie” Creaghe joined an expedition across the Gulf of Carpentaria from Normanton (Queensland) to Katherine (in today’s Northern Territory). She stopped for a while at Francis Shadforth’s Lilydale (later Riversleigh), astation neighbouring Lawn Hill.

Timothy Bottoms, a respected Cairns-based historian of frontier violence in north Queensland – author of The Conspiracy of Silence: Queensland’s Frontier Killing-times – writes how Carrie Creaghe recorded learning from the Shadforth women, that “Watson has forty pairs of blacks’ ears nailed round the walls collected during raiding parties after the loss of many Cattle speared by the blacks”.

As the toll of Australia’s frontier brutality keeps climbing, truth telling is long overdue | Paul Daley Read more

In their groundbreaking 2001 essay for Overland – Indigenocide and the Massacre of Aboriginal History – Queensland frontier war historians Raymond Evans and Bill Thorpe wrote how, “[Korah Halcomb] Wills dissected the Aboriginal body with the same matter-of-factness as Jack Watson and Frank Hann employed some twenty years later