He credited the discovery of the ledger to the Western Australia Museum’s search efforts to find old artifacts as a part of its expansion programme.

“Someone found it from the ashes... it didn’t get burnt due to their thickness,” Singh said. The Geraldton and Dongara areas were booming regions for the pioneer Sikhs of Western Australia (belonging to the Indian ethnicity), including Sojan Singh, Pola Singh, Ruhr Singh, and Anzac Nain Singh Sailani, who all belonged to these regions.

Sojan Singh was one of the few early Punjabi settlers of Western Australia, who owned a store and even a holiday home in Dongara. The earliest recorded evidence of a Sikh being in Western Australia was Pal Singh who arrived in Perth in 1886. He was a camel owner and settled in Wyndham, according to SAWA.

Now, the Sikhs form one of the largest subgroups of Indian Australians with 210,000 adherents according to the 2021 census, having grown from 12,000 in 1996, 17,000 in 2001, 26,500 in 2006, and 72,000 in 2011.