A shocking coincidence uncovers a family link to Australia’s hidden history of massacres, revealing how silence and denial still shape our nation, writes Frances Letters.
Synchronicity: a mild, thoughtful technological term that sounds worlds removed from the seismic shock of recognition its reality can sometimes trigger...
Friday 8 August. In the hope of aiding publication of the book I’ve written on racism, I’m recording an audio version. I’ve just finished Chapter 9: ‘Stumbling on the truth about Aboriginal massacres’. It tells how I grew up in the NSW country town of Armidale, just down the road from a whole Indigenous community. They lived in huts cobbled from bits of rusty galvanised iron and nailed-up potato sacks. In total squalor. At the dump.
It all seemed quite normal. Never had I heard a word about horrors such as massacres. But then one day, as a 19-year-old uni student, I stumbled on the truth. Over coffee, a fellow student related, with whoops and guffaws, how his landowner great-grandfather and his mates “used to go huntin’... for abos! Shoot ’em. Or horsewhip ’em over the gorge! Wheee! They sure didn’t climb up again!”
Soberly, I come to the end of the chapter. The final recorded words are sad: “The sinister silence that enveloped our nation had somehow swallowed up our home as well.” I press ‘Save’, switch over to my emails, then suddenly — shock. A wild synchronicity earthquake!
Top of the email list: Independent Australia. An article by Dr Rosemary Sorensen: Colonial killings hidden in code spark truth-telling debate. It cites a series from The Guardian. And there... the heading. An old photo of a stern, bearded man with cold eyes. A murderer. A pioneer who’d grabbed land in Western Australia and massacred many, many Indigenous people — “Major Logue”.
Logue? LOGUE? Could it honestly be? Impossible! And yet... an Irishman who came out to Australia in the mid-19th Century? Acquired great swathes of land? Became an MP?
The maiden name of my violinist mother was Kathleen Logue. So my sisters and I are half-Logues. Not Joneses or O’Brians or Smiths or something normal like that. Logue. A strange, rare name in Australia. Clearly not Irish. According to family folklore, our ancestor had been French and had migrated to Ireland to escape the French Revolution. One descendant had become a Cardinal and “Primate of All Ireland”.
And now this! My one-minute-ago recorded chapter about massacres, and abruptly... Major Logue! Clearly, my relative. He had been a vicious killer. Murderer of the true owners of the land — masters, managers, stewards since time out of mind.
Knowing that what he did was evil and possibly punishable by law, from the early 1850s, Logue had kept a diary in which his crimes were creepily hidden with a Masonic code called “pigpen”. Some of his WA descendants are now passionate about revealing the truths; others are too ashamed to discuss anything about him. Some tried furtively to destroy the diaries.
It seems that even some historians who are studying massacres are uneasy about openly stirring this particular nasty pot, lest its foul stink should disturb the genteel status quo. Apparently, a politely doctored version is to be published soon, minus the coded bits.
These questions are now addressed in The Guardian’s two-part podcast, The Descendants. So it seems that, triggered by the mysteries of synchronicity, thanks to IA, my family and I now have an astonishing new lens through which to view some tragic truths. Truths that, totally unknown to us, have all our lives been silently entangled in our cherished old bloodline.
Who knows what sullen knowledge lurks in other families’ histories as well? Knowledge that, if brought to light, might even trigger new awareness that would open eyes all over the nation. And benefit us all.
Frances Letters is a writer, journalist, meditation teacher and activist.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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