The Squatters’ Grab: where it all went wrong

A talk with Wal Walker

When: 25 October 2025 10.15am for 10.30am.

Where: Marrickville Library and Pavilion, Patyegarang Place, Marrickville Road, Marrickville.

Author and researcher Wal Walker states that all colonial governors appointed by the British government were under an obligation to the Crown to protect the lives of Indigenous Australians. His book The Squatters’ Grab traces the failure of governments and colonial administrators to discharge their obligations; failure that permitted the ascendancy of squatters, with violent dispossession and massacres of First Nations people.

It is nearly 60 years since anthropologist WEH Stanner talked about the ‘cult of forgetfulness’ and ‘the great Australian silence’ – not just a collective failure to acknowledge the atrocities but opting to not think about them at all. Many accounts of these terrible events exist as evidence. Wal Walker’s The Squatters’ Grab examines the evidence to understand why and how it all happened. 

Wal describes himself as ‘a researcher, trained as an economist, who has become a historian through exposure, travels throughout Australia, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa’. We’ve asked Wal to bring along copies of his book on the day.