The Caledon Bay crisis, refers to a series of killings at Caledon Bay in the Northern Territory of Australia during 1932–34, referred to in the press of the day as Caledon Bay murder(s). Five Japanese trepang fishers were killed by Aboriginal Australians of the Yolngu people. A police officer investigating the deaths, Albert McColl, was subsequently killed. Shortly afterwards, two white men went missing on Woodah Island (with one body found later). With some of the white community alarmed by these events, a punitive expedition was proposed by Northern Territory Police to "teach the blacks a lesson". However, it was feared that a punitive expedition would lead to an event similar to the 1928 Coniston massacre (when a number of innocent Aboriginal people were killed by a white patrol group after a murder). A party from the Church Missionary Society travelled to Arnhem Land and persuaded Dhakiyarr Wirrpanda and three other men, sons of a Yolngu elder, Wonggu, to return to Darwin with them for trial. In Darwin in April 1934, Dhakiyarr was sentenced to death by hanging for the murder of McColl. The three other men were sentenced to 20 years' hard labour. After a seven months’ investigation, the Federal Government freed the three men imprisoned for the killings. On appeal to the High Court of Australia, in a case known as Tuckiar v The King, Dhakiyarr's sentence was quashed in November 1934, and he was released from jail, but disappeared on his way home. Series of events Killings There had previously been killings of Japanese fishermen in 1921 and 1926. On 17 September 1932, five Japanese trepangers were killed by Aboriginal men in the Caledon Bay area of northeast Arnhem Land. (Evidence was later given that the Japanese men had taken several Aboriginal women.) In separate incident, two white men, William Fagan and Frank Traynor, had been reported missing some months earlier after they had not returned from a fishing expedition. In June 1933 a police party arrived in the area from Darwin, to look for suspects. On 1 August 1933, a group of police, led by Mounted Constable Ted Morey and including Constable Albert McColl, were on Woodah Island trying to track down the people they believed were involved in the killings of the Japanese and possibly the missing men. They came across a group of Aboriginal women, and McColl and the women became separated from the