In 2024 there are three main reasons why border district residents might look again at the stories we tell ourselves and our children about how the town of Albury began way back in 1838 and 1839.

First, the imminent approach of the bicentenary of the Hume and Hovell expedition awakens interest in the beginnings of the Murray River crossing place.

Second, the national curriculum requires history students in border district schools to look beyond Hume and Hovell and to undertake investigations of Aboriginal peoples' experiences of colonisation, preferably at the local as well as the national level.

Third, storytelling of the creation of the town might be accepted as a contribution towards reconciliation.

Some of the unfinished business arising from the failed Voice referendum at the national level of government is being addressed at the local and at state levels. Local governments, for example, have adopted reconciliation action plans which almost invariably call for sharing Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples' histories of occupation and survival, of conquest and resistance, as part of a healing process.

In Albury familiar stories abound of Hume and Hovell as intrepid explorers in 1824 and of Robert Brown as an enterprising publican in the late 1830s. Those stories have been broadened in recent times with riverside cultural trails that recognise Aboriginal peoples' long-term connection with the land and the river in both the past and the present.

These three sets of town-foundation stories have been told well and often.

They might, in 2024, be broadened yet again with rarely acknowledged, but parallel, foundation stories that include, rather than avoid, the dark under edge of dispossession and frontier violence.

Historians have become more insistent in unfolding such tales nationally and regionally.

Nationally, Rachel Perkins, with her documentary The Australian Wars challenged the Australian War Memorial to recognise the wars of resistance to white invasion. In regional NSW, Stephen Gapps and Bill Gammage have given accounts of the first Wiradjuri war in the Bathurst district and the second Wiradjuri war near Narrandera.

Such stories spark interest in how the Wiradjuri, the Waywurru, the Taungurung and other First Nations peoples along the road that passed through the border district resisted the invasion of white people.

Succinctly, a complex narrative emerges from government records, focused on the time between 1838 and 1844 when pastoralism expanded beyond the limits of location set in the 1820s. The narrative re-centres the creation of the town of Albury into the context of conquest and resistance.

In April 1838 Aboriginal people killed seven overlanders at Broken River. As a result of what became known as the Faithfull Massacre, the Governor of New South Wales, Sir George Gipps decided to establish several military posts along the route from Yass to Port Phillip.

These mounted military police posts were to provide "for the protection of colonists frequenting the route and to provide for the apprehension of (convict) runaways" and to open the new country for settlement beyond the limits of location.

The government hoped that armed policemen in smart uniforms, mounted on large strong horses provided a show of the colonists' military might which would inspire would-be settlers with confidence and create awe among the Aboriginal peoples.

At the same time, Gipps endorsed the Deputy Surveyor General's proposal to establish towns as well as the military posts as "regular halting places or posts of protection".

The government hoped the towns would develop "post houses and houses of public entertainment" at the principal crossing places. Artisans from both ends of the line might move there to ply trades needed to serve thoroughfare towns.

In July-August 1838, a surveyor located a ford and fixed the site for a police hut and a town at a place called Bungambrawatha on the Murray River. In October 1838, a hut serving as a mounted police barracks was built. In April 1839, the surveyed town was called Albury and blocks of land within it were offered for sale.

This establishment of the official Murray River crossing place on the route between Yass and Port Phillip, with a police hut and an adjacent town helped secure the line of communication. It helped make possible pastoral expansion southward.

It enabled the theft of Aboriginal land. It had profound consequences for Aboriginal communities and their way of life. It changed this place forever. It was a pivotal moment.

One effective way to demonstrate commitment to reconciliation is to have Albury City Council and its Dyiraamalang reconciliation advisory committee share stories of Albury's beginnings by facilitating the archaeological investigation of the police hut site recommended back in 2017.

The police hut site is a public memory place, a place that matters, especially in 2024. Yet the site and the stories behind it have been neglected.

The site is currently invisible. Unmarked, forgotten, out of sight, out of mind. Walkers can glimpse the knoll, west of Albury Swim Centre, on which the police hut stood, from the western end of the board walk. Looking towards Padman Drive, they can distinguish the knoll marked by a tall sewer vent. The site itself can be more closely seen from the Mate Padman Park walking track.

Recognition of the police hut site as a public memory place presents opportunities for survival and colonist descendants to share differing reckonings of the town's earliest times.

It may be expected that stories told of the police hut site will clarify understandings of how relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people were initially forged and help explain how mindsets have developed subsequently.

Such stories provide a base to trace entanglements, then and now. They include interactions that were cooperative as well as uncooperative, when two peoples were learning to live together and separately.

Bleak, dark, stories of dispossession and dispersal can give way to enabling stories of resilience and survival. Stories of violent conquest can be revisited with stories that provide the dignity of resistance.

The police hut site is a contact place that prompts, as Heather Goodall, a historian, suggests, "the sharing of stories among Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people relating to the productive lives pursued nearby before the intrusion of Europeans and to learn about the impact of that intrusion".

There seems to be a community readiness, even urgency, in 2024 to break the silence surrounding why the town of Albury was created by Governor Gipps.

In retelling stories of town beginnings in 2024, we might be prompted to lift our eyes from the Hovell Tree and from the riverside cultural trails to the unmarked site of the police hut.

Wungamaa, aka Pastor Cec Grant OAM, often quoted the aphorism, "Nothing can change the past. It has happened, but the future can be changed if we look to the past".