FOR Muthi Muthi and Wamba Wamba man Jason Kelly, a map of massacre sites along the Murray River marks not just a brutal period in our region's history, but memories of murder, infanticide and torture passed down as oral histories through generations of his family.

His grandmother remembers stories of people on the banks of the Murray being shot at from early paddlesteamers, and people shackled and shipped downstream on boats.

One of Mr Kelly's uncles, now in his mid-80s, a Muthi Muthi man who married a Barkindji woman, remembers stories of "skulls knee-deep at Lake Victoria", an oral history that could be connected with one of several massacres that took place at Rufus River in 1941.

Mr Kelly says telling these and other stories is the key to Victorians understanding our "true history".

As an elected member of the First People's Assembly of Victoria, he is a driving force behind the Yoo-rrook Justice Commission, a truth-telling process due to get under way in Victoria later this year.

The commission, named after the Wamba Wamba word for truth, was announced in March as part of the Victorian Government's work towards a treaty with Aboriginal Victorians. It will be given a remit to investigate both historical and ongoing injustices against Aboriginal Australians and has been compared to South Africa's post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Each dot on what has come to be known as Australia's "massacre map" represents the indiscriminate killing of at least six Aboriginal people, meticulously researched by historians from the University of Newcastle's Centre for the History of Violence.

In a stretch of country from near what is now the South Australian border to Loddon Junction, south-east of Swan Hill, there are 11 massacre sites, some holding the remains of dozens of bodies.

Conventional histories of our region steer away from such stories, focusing instead on tales of pioneer triumph against hardship in the early days of the overland stock route.

But for Mr Kelly, the stories of those killed at Mount Dispersion, south-east of Mildura, are not easily forgotten.

"They were my people," he says.

The details of that massacre, in which 20 to 30 Aboriginal people were shot and killed, were graphically laid out in a newspaper report from 1836.

"It appears that Major Mitchell having, or fancying he had, reason to apprehend danger from a numerous tribe who followed close upon their tracks for above two hundred miles, laid in ambush with his party in a thick scrub bordering upon a river, sending the bullock-drivers on cracking their whips so as to induce a belief that they had proceeded onwards.

The natives having unconsciously advanced into the midst of the ambuscade, were set upon and fired at, a large number being killed on the spot, and the remainder taking the river, into which they plunged, swimming to the other side, the Europeans firing at and killing several more in the water. It is said that at least thirty were slain; how many escaped with wounds does not appear."

Massacres along the Murray River continued on for decades as settlers pushed across the nation's interior.

To date, official recognition of these events has relied on written evidence like reports from newspapers written at the time, or settler diary entries.

But oral histories passed down through generations of Aboriginal people suggest there are many more incidents that have not yet been documented, Mr Kelly says, and he hopes they will come to light through the commission process.

The Yoo-rrook commission, which will be the first of its kind in Australia, will start its journey around Victoria later this year, stopping in cities and towns to hold hearings and listen to people's stories of colonisation and its ongoing effects.

The process will be "confronting" says Aunty Geraldine Atkinson, a Bangerang and Wiradjuri woman whose mother grew up on Cummeragunja Mission near Barmah.

Her mother was "a very strong and resilient woman" who was forced to move six times with her children to stop authorities taking them away from her, she says. Ultimately she was successful in making sure they "didn't come to the notice of welfare officers".

"They were very harsh conditions (on the mission)," she says. "They were doled out rations, you weren't allowed to leave, and if you did you weren't allowed to come back."

Her family's stories are just some of thousands of "stories of dispossession, stories of being separated from parents, of having to live on missions, having to live in abject poverty, and about being considered second-class citizens in their own country" that will be heard by the commission.

For Ms Atkinson, who has worked in education for more than 40 years, it is time the "true history of Australia" is taught in schools.

Children learn about Aboriginal culture, she says, about "dance and art and songs", but "we've come to a point in time when we need to know and everyone needs to know (the history)".

"(The Yoo-rrook commission) will create awareness within the broader community," she says.

"People are ready to hear these things."

Mr Kelly says there is a misconception that Australian government policies discriminating against Aboriginal people ended a long time ago. But his story, and those of many others, show even younger generations of Aboriginal people carry scars -- both physical and mental -- of lived experiences with such policies.

When he was a boy, Mr Kelly remembers running in fear with his cousins into the scrub whenever a government car arrived in his small hometown of Balranald.

The kids would hide out all day, "waiting for dark to come back" before they made their way home, he says.

Gunai-Kurnai woman Veronica Heritage-Gorrie says when many Australians, particularly young people, think of the stolen generations, it brings to mind a far-away era encapsulated in Phillip Noyce's iconic film Rabbit Proof Fence, the story of three Aboriginal girls who make their way home from a remote mission in 1930s Western Australia.

But when Mr Kelly ran to hide in the scrub it was only 40 years ago. Mr Kelly was seven or eight years old, and although legislation ending the forcible removal of children had been brought in a few years earlier, his family didn't know it yet.

In Balranald, he says, parents still lived in fear of losing their children, and children in fear of being taken away, into the early 1980s.

When the Yoo-rrook commission comes to Mildura, Aunty Geraldine "would like to encourage Aboriginal people to come forward to tell their story".

Sharing these difficult stories will be triggering and difficult for people, she says, so the commission will offer support to those who decide to come forward.

She also called on non-Aboriginal people to share their knowledge with the commission, "in particular farmers and people that have worked with Aboriginal people and people that may have been ex-police officers, (or people whose) ancestors might have handed down stories about how they were associated with removing children".

"There are lots of people out there that have all that history, and all those stories," she says. "The more people participate, the better it will be."

To explain the importance of the process, Mr Kelly draws on tens of thousands of years of cultural lore.

"Aboriginal people are like Makawarra, the eagle, in Muthi Muthi and Wamba Wamba culture," he says, "and non-Aboriginal people are like Kilparra, the crow."

"All around the world, the eagle always fights the crow," he says, but Muthi Muthi and Wamba Wamba lore brings them together.

"They are like two halves of one whole."

According to traditional practices, "the eagle cannot marry another eagle, and the crow cannot marry another crow," Mr Kelly says.

"The eagle must marry the crow ... Because if you don't marry your equal opposite, you'll never have an understanding of the universe."

Bringing Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people together through a truth-telling process could "lead to transformation", he says, and an "understanding of the impacts of colonisation".