Councillors also gave James Patrick Murray a glowing job reference 150 years ago this month.

"The Mayor thought the Council was bound, as a matter of duty, to grant a testimonial to the doctor, who had worked very hard and earnestly at a time when a public calamity was apprehended," the Bendigo Advertiser reported at the time.

Then the council gave him a £50 bonus - or more than $10,000 in today's money, by one estimate.

So, what does an alleged mass murderer need to do to get into the Bendigo council's good books?

This story begins with a malignant shape appearing on the horizon of a vast, endless sea. The shape was that of a brig called the Carl, and it was crisscrossing the small outcrops jutting out of the Pacific Ocean, offering an exciting opportunity to spend a few years working Fiji's cotton plantations.

Not everyone being enlisted had actually agreed to go, so the sailors thought it prudent to tie them up, below deck.

The boat's unlikely owner - James Murray - was a well-to-do Melbourne doctor who had left his wife and children at home. He had charmed a number of Victorian investors into coming with him on a trip to Fiji. They would loan him money and he would land them with a bunch of islanders happy to transform virgin land into boundless cottonfields.

Murray was "a young man of neat, rather dandified appearance, good-looking and with any amount of assurance and self confidence, suave and ingratiating in a manner which 'went down' particularly well with the ladies," according to one New Zealand paper that covered the well-travelled man in the early 1860s.

But a polished manner could hide a multitude of sins, an 1875 writer would say as he blamed Murray entirely for events about to erupt in the Pacific . The doctor was "cruel, treacherous, mean in money matters, a liar in word and a traitor in action".

Murray had an extremely violent side, going by some accounts. When a group of enslaved islanders caused trouble below deck one night, Murray unleashed hell.

He and crew members spent hours firing indiscriminately into the hold. When that did not work, they drilled new holes into the wooden deck so they could fire more easily, according to one account.

Thirty-five dead islanders were thrown overboard. Another 35 injured South Sea islanders were weighed down with pig iron and dropped into the sea. Murray appears to have made no attempt to see if injured prisoners could be treated. "Probably, as a speculation in labor, he thought their cure would cost too much," the Advertiser remarked in an editorial written in late August 1871.

The crew shipped 59 islanders to Fiji and pocketed a hefty £561 finders' fee, or roughly $1.16 million in today's money.

Modern day readers should perhaps be a little cautious about some of the tales of Murray's cruelty. Multiple witnesses were themselves on board the Carl and later faced the death penalty. They may have wanted to minimise or fabricate their own roles in the violence.

They might have also wanted revenge. You see, Murray had not just employed them. He had also betrayed them.

The doctor had snitched them out and cut a deal for immunity from prosecution.

The doctor was becoming increasingly paranoid, one person aboard the Carl said. "After tea the Doctor made a rush on deck, tomahawk in hand and threw himself into the sea ... and tried to swim away from the ship."

Murray insisted he had good reason to jump overboard.

"My life was attempted," he would tell a court as the star witness in the trial of the captain he employed, crew members he paid and voyages he spearheaded.

Murray's life had not always seemed destined to end in ignominy.

Born in Ireland and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, the son of a merchant had travelled south in the heyday of the gold rushes and eventually set up a medical practice in Melbourne. But that romanticism had soured by the late 1860s, historian Ronald Elmslie would later write in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Surgery.

"The more venturesome of young men now looked for wealth and fame to the South Seas, and particularly to the Fiji Islands," he wrote in 1979.

This attraction had its ominous side. "For years American and British discards from society had used the islands to escape either the law or the tedium of more established society and to plunder with few restraints," Elsmlie observed. Many of these dregs of society were fugitives.

That might have appealed to something deep within Murray.

Still, things were looking up for the doctor by July 1872.

He had returned to Victoria from his Fiji adventure. Few in the colony knew he was connected to sketchy reports from Fiji of an apparent slave boat that had been caught roaming the region.

As far as anyone seemed to know, Dr Murray was still an upstanding, respectable Melbourne doctor anxious to use his skills to help people out.

And in any case, health officials' minds were elsewhere.

A deadly smallpox outbreak had erupted in Bendigo in the winter of 1872. Authorities rushed to find a new doctor willing to personally treat people for one of the most feared illnesses of the 19th century.

The industrious Murray was available and happy to help.

"Dr Murray will have unlimited power to order every requisite and to carry out every improvement which he may conceive to be necessary. No half measures must be tolerated in a case of this kind," the Advertiser reported.

Just as Bendigo's saviour appeared, news arrived that Murray would be needed in Sydney for the trial.

"There is a very general alarm throughout the district, and the report that other cases of small-pox had occurred caused a very painful feeling throughout the city yesterday."

The council urgently telegrammed contacts begging to keep Murray from Sydney courtrooms until the crisis ended.

And as the weather warmed, 150 years ago this month, Murray contained the outbreak and was preparing to nip off to Sydney for two or three weeks. It was an incredible achievement. Bendigo would gratefully remember Murray - "indeed the colony will ... for many a long day in connection with this outbreak" - the Advertiser trilled.

Then all hell broke loose.

Enslaving South Sea islanders was a tricky business.

You could try impersonating a missionary, though islanders did not seem to fall for it by the 1870s. You could go on shore with a gun, though that had its own challenges if prisoners started getting ideas. Or you could trick them into coming on shore to trade, Murray told a Sydney courtroom in August 1872.

"A signal being given, a simultaneous rush was made by the crew upon the natives ... [they] were seized hold of and bundled down the hold in any way as quickly as possible," he is quoted telling the court in an account published in multiple newspapers, including the Advertiser.

The prosecution's most important witness appears to have been the person who worked out one way of capturing slaves. The crew would wait until islanders in canoes came alongside the Carl to trade goods and drop heavy pig iron chains. The canoes would sink and islanders could choose to climb on board or drown.

Public opinion was not kind. Appalled Victorians asked how a ship purchased and registered in their colony had been caught up in slave trading, and why the doctor was not being booted from the medical profession. Multiple Victorians found themselves implicated in the scheme and insisting that they had helped finance the Fiji trip without knowing it was a slave voyage.

The colony's leader, James Francis, demanded to know how Murray had landed a job in Bendigo when he was "totally unfit to have control over any such institution", The Age reported in late August. Skittish health officials insisted they had had no idea the doctor was at all connected with the Carl.

As the backlash intensified, Murray telegrammed back to Bendigo saying he was preparing to return and once again be the district's health officer. "It would be impossible to say what kind of reception he ought to get from the citizens of Sandhurst, whose health he is to have the superintendence of," a perplexed Advertiser observed.

Murray never did return to Bendigo but he did take the time to thank the council for giving him bonuses and glowing testimonials.

"It is true that I was one of the humble instruments employed by God in stamping out the small-pox in your city and sundries," he said piously. "But in the face of the dreadful opprobrium heaped upon me by the Victorian press I scarcely dared to hope that any public body could be found willing to deal out to such as one as me a full measure of reward and honour."

The council's "bold and honest" actions came at the dawn of a happier epoch of his life, the doctor gushed. He had rediscovered salvation in Christ and had dedicated himself to anti-slave activities.

No-one was buying it.

"A more sickening and disgusting tirade of hypocrisy and cant has seldom, if ever, found its way into print," the Advertiser remarked. That said, its editor sympathised with a deeply embarrassed council, saying it had learned the worst of Murray's atrocities only when they had been aired in court at Sydney.

"They had previously determined on giving the man a reward for his services to them, which had unquestionably been of great public importance, and on no account that can we conceive of could they decide to with-hold him from it," he said.

It would have been dishonourable not to pay the bonus, the editor argued.

In the months that followed, Fiji authorities officially seized Murray's boat as authorities bickered over who should take the islanders back to their homes. The Carl's captain and first mate were sentenced to death, other crew members were convicted of assault and two passengers jailed for manslaughter. Two had their sentences lessened. Another two walked free on appeal.

Murray hung around Sydney for a couple of months after the first round of court cases ended, regularly attending church.

Then he vanished, leaving his wife and two children in Victoria.

"It is generally believed that he has gone to England," newspaper the Sydney Empire reported. "So ends the colonial history of a man whose name will go down to posterity as one of the most vile offenders that ever disgraced the annals of this country."

This is the latest story in the Bendigo Advertiser's history series entitled "WHAT HAPPENED?"

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