In 1836, Governor Richard Bourke passed the "Squatting Act" to allow pastoralists or "squatters", as they were colloquially known, to run their sheep and cattle on New South Wales Crown Lands beyond the limits of white settlement for a small fee. However, the act failed to address the subsequent settler-Aboriginal conflict that the act would inevitable lead to. Beginning with the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, paramilitary units such as the New South Wales Military Mounted Police and the Australian native police and armed settlers were the main instruments of suppressing Aboriginal resistance to European colonization. In 1838, two large mass-killings of Indigenous people occurred on the frontier. One was the Waterloo Creek massacre perpetrated by troops of the New South Wales Military Mounted Police, and the other was the Myall Creek massacre committed by a group of armed settlers.
