massacres (and a butcher by trade who used his skills to dismember at least one of his Aboriginal victims). A couple of years ago I recounted my disgust at handling, even with gloved hands, the diary in which he recounted butchering an Aboriginal victim and stealing as a trophy a little Aboriginal girl (she later died; he cared more about the death of a horse) who survived one of his massacres.

He was a monster in an epoch when monstrous acts of violence against the Indigenous people who resisted rapacious pastoral expansion, sometimes through a passive presence only, were shrugged off as an inevitable, necessary part of frontier life.

History heavily implicates the Hanns in extreme frontier violence, too. Which is why, while there is ever a doubt about theircomplicity, a critical new 48-kilometre stretch of highway (completing an inland Cairns-Melbourne road route that is of great financial benefit to the Queensland pastoral industry) should never be named in their honour.

The soon-to-be-sealed Kennedy Development Road between Hughenden and Lynd Junction is already being informally referred to as the “Hann Highway” by local, state and federal authorities, and MPs including Bob Katter and Warren Entsch. The regular use of the name “Hann Highway” is, it seems, a step towards its official gazettal.

The ABC also refers to the “Hann Highway”.

At a time when governments talk endlessly (often with forked tongue) of reconciliation with Indigenous nations, there is a slow, national movement towards stripping the names of those who massacred and otherwise mistreated Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from