The killing code: strange symbols in a WA settler’s diaries lay bare frontier atrocities

Exclusive: Stories of murders passed down by Yamatji elders are confirmed by a cipher hidden in the 1850s journals of prominent Western Australian pastoralist Major Logue. Now descendants on both sides want to break the shame and silence

• Read more from Guardian Australia’s series The Descendants here

By Lorena Allam, Sarah Collard and Ella Achibald-Binge. Photographs: Tamati Smith. Interactive: Nick Evershed, Andy Ball and Victoria Hart

Warning: This article contains historical records that use racist and offensive language, and descriptions of events that will be distressing to some readers

It’s early morning in the Battye library in Perth, Western Australia, and we’re scrolling through microfilm pages of the diary of a prominent and powerful colonist called Major Logue.

Logue kept the diary for 50 years, until his death in 1900. He wrote in it almost every day. Entries are written in looping script, sometimes neat and measured, other times messy and cramped. Pages are peppered with sketches of horses and faces, designs for a house, mud maps, lists of crops and stock. It’s all fairly mundane. Most entries simply recount the work done on the farm by Logue and his men: fences mended, potatoes planted, cattle lost and found.

SHOT THREE OF THEM FOR IT.AND THAT THE WHITE FELLOWS HAD SHOT SEVERAL OF THEM FOR IT FIRED BOTH BARRELS OF MY GUN AND WOUNDED ONE FELLOW IN THE RUMP. THOMSON AND DICKY SHOT ONE DEAD

There are 11 coded diary entries between 1851 and 1853 that describe shooting and killing people; witnessing others in his employ doing the shooting; going on a “campaign” to kill natives; and later riding over the “battlefield” and seeing the bodies of those he had killed lying dead or “hastily buried”.

By his own account he was part of groups who shot and killed at least 19 Yamatji people around what is now called Ellendale, Walkaway and the Greenough River.

On 23 June, 1852, Logue wrote that he had been part of a party who killed three Yamatji people.

23 June 1852

Wednesday started after breakfast and [Karney] and I [went round] on our side of the [tracks] Menzies and Norries took the other after a couple of hours tracking we met at an appointed place and were all equally puzzled by the number of tracks [travelling] in every direction. Tom [Karney] returned home and we went on toward the flats to see whether we could find where the cattle had finally gone at [noon/nine] being on a hill we saw a fire at a distance and supposing it to be an encampment of natives we kept ourselves out of sight of it and rode round to try and get close and [obtain] some information from the natives concerning the cattle. Saw some natives

AND RODE AT THEM RECTOR SHIED AND PUT HIS FOOT IN A HOLE AND FELL CRUSHING MY LEFT HAND AND KNEE AND KNOCKING THE CAP OFF MY PISTOL CAUGHT RECTOR AND GAVE CHASE TO A NIGGER APPLIED PILL MENZES AND NARRIER DID FOR 2 MORE

Lost my helmet trying to stop some of the natives to enquire about the cattle. Returned toward Glengary Called at the sheep station and heard that the natives had stolen some [fillies] got to Glengary at dusk Kenneth was at home Gregory had been there and was expected next morning on his way to Perth heard that Thomson had been [kicking] up a [indecipherable] about my having taken a horse and same had heard that the [indecipherable] had been found on the [Arwin]

Two days later he described a “battlefield”.

25 June 1852

The original large leather-bound ledgers have been in the private collection of a descendant, who declined to speak on the record. But they were loaned for copying to the State Library of Western Australia in 1955 and have been available for public reading in the stacks of the Battye library ever since.

Some of Logue’s other descendants, and those of other colonist families in the Geraldton region, have spoken to Guardian Australia. They want to break the silence surrounding their ancestors’ involvement in frontier violence. They have begun meeting with the Yamatji descendants of the survivors.

Australia’s archives contain many colonial diaries. They are how we are able to understand just how widespread frontier murders and massacres were; how commonplace it was among colonists to shoot and kill Aboriginal men, women and children on sight, for no reason and without consequences.

What makes Logue’s diaries unique is that he wrote about these exploits using code at a time when such killings were frowned upon by colonial society. And, because he kept those diaries for 50 years from his arrival in the Geraldton region until his death, we can see how he materially benefited from those killings.