With apology in the air, Guardian Australia has reported the Sydney Morning Herald’s apology for “failing dismally” on its coverage of 1838 Myall Creek massacre.

The move follows an apology by The Guardian’s owner, the Scott Trust, for its role in transatlantic slavery.

But the Australian news website has curiously illustrated the story neither with a historic reprint, nor the Herald’s current issue… but with a picture showing the print newspaper as a broadsheet (which incidentally, it credits to Cameron Spencer/Getty Images). It abandoned the format in 2013 as part of a move to decentralise print production.

The Nine Entertainment newspaper admits it “essentially campaigned” for 11 stockmen accused of killing at least 28 Aboriginal people to escape prosecution. The stockmen led by John Henry Fleming rounded up and brutally killed at least 28 Wirrayaraay women, children and elderly people while their young men were away helping another settler.

An editorial on Friday says “in several editorials published before, during and after two Sydney trials in late 1838 relating to the massacre, the Herald essentially campaigned for the 11 accused mass murderers to escape prosecution,” opposing the death sentence eventually handed to seven of the men.

“In one editorial published ahead of the trials and amid a public debate about legal protections for Aboriginal people, the Herald proclaimed, ‘The whole gang of black animals are not worth the money the colonists will have to pay for printing the silly documents on which we have already wasted too much time’.”

Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald Bevan Shields said the attitude of the paper “could not be excused by the historical context as it was not necessarily shared by other publications at the time, which had ‘much more respectful’ coverage.

The Herald had encouraged readers “to shoot and kill Aboriginal people if they ever felt threatened”.