The 1946 Pilbara strike was a landmark strike by Indigenous Australian pastoral workers in the Pilbara region of Western Australia for human rights recognition, payment of fair wages and working conditions. The strike involved at least 800 Aboriginal pastoral workers walking off the large pastoral stations in the Pilbara on 1 May 1946, and from employment in the two major towns of Port Hedland and Marble Bar. The strike did not end until August 1949 and even then many Indigenous Australians refused to go back and work for white station owners. It is regarded as the first industrial strike by Aboriginal people since colonisation and one of if not the longest industrial strikes in Australia, and a landmark in indigenous Australians fighting for their human rights, cultural rights, and Native title. Working conditions For many years Aboriginal pastoral workers in the Pilbara were denied cash wages and were only paid in supplies of tobacco, flour and other necessities. The pastoral stations treated the Aboriginal workers as a cheap slave labour workforce to be exploited. Many tried to leave the stations on which they worked but were met with legal resistance; those who were unsuccessful could be whipped and those who escaped were hunted by police and returned. The situation was that "while Aboriginal labour was required, Aboriginal people were treated as if they were expendable". European attacks and brutal shootings of whole family groups of Aboriginal Australians are part of the history of the region, though often not well documented. One attack took place at Skull Creek in the Northern Territory a few kilometers north of Ti-Tree in the 1870s, which resulted in the bleached bones and thus the name for the place. In 1926 the Forrest River massacre was carried out by a police party on the Forrest River Mission (later the Aboriginal community of Oombulgurri), in the East Kimberleys. Though there was a royal commission into the reported killing and burning of Aboriginal people in the East Kimberley, the police allegedly involved were brought to trial and acquitted. As well as proper wages and better working conditions, Aboriginal lawmen sought natural justice arising from the original Western Australian colonial Constitution. As a condition for self-rule in the colony, the British Government insisted that once public revenue in WA exceeded 500,000 pounds, 1 per cent was to be dedicated to "the welfare of the Aboriginal natives" under Section 70