This was contested territory with the settlers making clear that their land interests were at stake and the settler demands for military style retribution for the killing of the white settlers by the Maraura people defending their land. The upshot was another expedition led by Major Thomas O’Halloran that met with another overland party led by Robinson and the result was the Rufus River massacre in 1841 near Lake Victoria.
The official inquiry sided with the white colonists as do the foundational colonial histories that dismiss settler society’s responsibility for dispossession of aborigines from their land, the frontier massacres in responses to indigenous resistance to invasion, and the destruction of aboriginal society. The settler myth is that the process of pioneer settlement in South Australia was relatively bloodless. South Australia was different to the other colonies.
The foundational histories held that Australians, building on the British heritage, built a modern, progressive nation whilst indigenous Australian were cast as primitive and unchanging relics of the past. The conservative interpretation of this traditional history holds that settlement was a necessary and benevolent introduction of civilization. It depends upon the silencing of Aboriginal narratives, bluntly denies the violence on the frontier, justifies the removal of Aboriginal children on the grounds that it was done with the best of intentions, and tells us to forget the dark past whilst celebrating the good past (ie., the heroism of the pioneers).
Nourishing Terrains 
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