The massacre of 28 Aboriginal people in 1838 was the first and only time in Australia when white people were arrested, charged and prosecuted for the mass killing of First Nations people.

Those people killed at Myall Creek Station in northern NSW were women, children and elderly men known as Wirrayaraay, a tribal clan of the Gamilaraay nation.

But while some publications held the perpetrators to account, our papers did not. 185 years on, The Sydney Morning Herald confronts the brutality of its own coverage of the Myall Creek massacre and two subsequent trials. 

Today, editor of The Sydney Morning Herald Bevan Shields, columnist Peter FitzSimons and chief reporter Jordan Baker on attempting to right the wrongs of the past.