The context matters. In 1926, Frederick Hay and Leopold Overheu held the Nulla Nulla property near Wyndham, bordering the Forrest River Aboriginal Mission run by Reverend Ernest Gribble. Hay had for years taken and molested Aboriginal women from the mission. Gribble had filed complaints. Authorities had done little. When local Aboriginal people speared Nulla Nulla cattle — a form of resistance, and for some, subsistence — Hay and Overheu complained loudly, claiming £10,000 worth of damage. Their property was declared a prohibited area under the 1905 Aborigines Act, blocking Aboriginal people from crossing it to reach other country. Then, in May 1926, Hay disappeared. His body was found twelve kilometres from the homestead, killed by Lumbia, an Aboriginal man who said he acted in self-defence after Hay struck him first. The police response was not a measured investigation. It was something else entirely.

Constable James St Jack, based at Wyndham, set out with Aboriginal assistants and the property holders to find Hay's killer. At dawn on 24 May, near Durragee Hill, his patrol rushed a camp of around 300 Aboriginal people who were holding a ceremony on a river island. Survivors described men being beaten to death, women and children herded to a cliff and pushed off, nine men shot and thrown into a bonfire. St Jack and Overheu would later claim they had shot only dogs. The expedition continued for weeks. When veterinary surgeon Daniel Murnane finally left the patrol and returned to Wyndham, witnesses reported he said it was "worse than the war" — a statement he later denied. Gribble, hearing reports from surviving Aboriginal people, calculated that at least 30 had been killed. Local estimates ran far higher.

Inspector William Douglas personally investigated the massacre sites two weeks after the patrol returned. At a ravine near Police Camp No. 3, having been guided by Suleiman — an Aboriginal tracker who had participated in the events — Douglas found "the remains of a large fire and some thousands of fragments of bone in the ashes." Ash had been scooped from most fire sites and thrown into nearby billabongs; charcoal and bone fragments were still visible on the bottom. Other sites showed the same pattern of shooting, burning, and disposal. Douglas's findings were damning. Constables St Jack and Regan were arrested and charged with murder. A Royal Commission in 1927 found that eleven Aboriginal people had been murdered at several locations. And yet the case never went to trial. A preliminary hearing concluded a jury could not be expected to convict.

The man who killed Frederick Hay — Lumbia — was convicted of murder at a trial in October 1926, sentenced to death, the sentence later commuted to life imprisonment. He served time on Rottnest Island and at Broome Regional Prison before eventually walking himself back to Forrest River Mission in 1936, where no one came to return him. He died there in 1950. The constables who led the punitive expedition faced no similar reckoning. Denials that any massacre occurred continued for decades. The Western Australian Police did not acknowledge the massacre until at least 2001. In 1999, a journalist published a book arguing it had all been invented by Reverend Gribble — this despite official police and government investigations confirming at minimum eleven murders. Most historians accept the Royal Commission's general conclusions. The bones in the ash were real. The silence around them was deliberate, and it lasted a very long time.