Fraser family grave site and memorial, Hornet Bank, Historical grave site at Hornet Bank Station, Queensland, Australia.
The Fraser family grave site is a memorial featuring a three-tiered concrete plinth surrounded by hollow metal railings within a fenced enclosure at Hornet Bank Station. The structure sits in a rural pastoral setting near Taroom in inland Queensland.
Eleven settlers including eight Fraser family members were killed in 1857 during a confrontation with Indigenous Australians. The memorial was constructed a century later in 1957 by descendants of Andrew Scott to mark this event.
The name Hornet Bank reputedly comes from a hornet swarm that attacked Andrew Scott when he took up the lease in 1853; the local Aboriginal name for the area was Gaganybilany. The killings of 27 October 1857 were described in the contemporary press as a "dreadful calamity" and revived squatter demands for frontier protection, leading to a six-month campaign in the Dawson and Burnett districts in which several hundred Aboriginal people are estimated to have been killed.
The memorial is located roughly 250 meters northwest of the Hornet Bank homestead along Hornet Bank Road. Visitors need private transport to reach this remote rural location near Taroom.
The concrete memorial on the grave site was erected in October 1957, exactly one hundred years after the killings, by descendants of Andrew Scott, who had taken up Hornet Bank station in 1853. The sole survivor of the attack was Sylvester Fraser, then aged 15.
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