FOUR days after Moreton Bay commandant Captain Patrick Logan went missing, searchers found his body face down in a shallow grave. If dingoes had not scratched away the earth from his feet, the search might have taken longer.

Brushing the soil from Logan's naked and bloodied corpse, members of the search party noted that the commandant's skull had been bashed from behind, an indication that the colony's most feared man had been struck down by stealth.

Clues were sparse. The manner of burial showed a ritualistic attention to detail. Long sticks decorated the sides of the grave. Logan's clothing had been plundered save for his shoes which had been removed but left close by.

At the time of his disappearance, on October 17, 1830, Logan had been mapping the headwaters of the Brisbane River. As his mission neared completion, he ordered the rest of his party to return, proceeding unescorted towards Mt Beppo.

What happened next remains a mystery. Investigators supposed that Aborigines had ambushed Logan. Another scenario blamed escaped convicts who, chancing on their nemesis alone in the bush, seized the chance to exact terrible revenge.

Either way, Logan's demise wrote an epitaph to the colony's bloodiest chapter — an era when convicts were literally whipped to death and desperate prisoners cast lots to slit one another's throats as a merciful escape from torment.

His grisly murder might have served as a warning to future explorers seeking to uncover the mysteries that lay inland from the coastal fringe and the Great Dividing Range, but few paid heed. Logan had died within easy reach of Brisbane. More ambitious expeditions led by Ludwig Leichhardt, Robert Burke and Williams Wills and Edmund Kennedy would come to grief in the wilderness, leaving mystery, tragedy and heroism in their wake.

Unhappily for Logan, his reputation as a tyrant eclipsed his work as an explorer in the Moreton Bay region where, among other achievements, he discovered the river that now bears his name and contributed to the exploration of the Tweed. As well as leading his own expeditions, Logan often accompanied surveyor-general Allan Cunningham — though he was not with the party that in 1828 located Cunningham's Gap, opening a land route from Brisbane to the Darling Downs.

Apologists for Logan point out that treatment of convicts in Sydney, under governor Ralph Darling, was scarcely more benign. Given the daunting nature of his task, Logan's sadistic stewardship might be comprehended, if not excused. Cast into the unknown, Logan struggled to build a colony using a reluctant workforce of criminals. He knew little about his environment and his training led him to "disperse" the only people who might have informed him — Aborigines.

As for the convicts . . . Moreton Bay was never intended to accommodate hardened recidivists. Tough nuts went to Norfolk Island. Moreton Bay had been envisaged as a repository for runaways and prisoners convicted of crimes within Australia.

But fine distinctions did not concern Logan. He showed neither pity nor kindness, treating all inmates as the worst of the worst. As numbers increased (from 77 to 1000 in five years), he imposed escalating levels of intimidation. Governor Darling was sufficiently impressed to reward the commandant with a pay rise.

Rapture among prisoners was more restrained. More than 300 of them fled into the bush. The presence of runaway convicts among the tribes gave credence to another murder theory: that renegade whites incited blacks to kill Logan.

Allan Cunningham

As the penal years receded into history, free settlers reaped benefit from the sweat and misery of the lash-scarred wretches who cleared the bush, established farms and erected public buildings. Cunningham's discovery of a pass to the Downs encouraged pastoralists to push north — a land rush spearheaded by brothers Patrick, Walter and George Leslie who, in 1840, drove 5000 sheep from New England to the Condamine River.

As gentlemen graziers carved out dynasties on the Darling Downs, they wondered whether greener pastures lay beyond. In 1844, Prussian adventurer Ludwig Leichhardt set out from Jimbour, on the Darling Downs, to find out.

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