(Photo by Bidgee)

Before the arrival of the white colonists, the bunya pine was of significant importance to the Aboriginal people of South-East Queensland. Despite its name, the bunya pine (Araucaria bidwilli) is a conifer and not a true pine. The genus name Araucaria has its origins in the word Arauco, an area in Southern Chile where the monkey puzzle tree (A, araucana) grows. The second part is named after the botanist John Bidwill the first “scientist” to describe the tree in detail. The first whites to see the bunya pine were escaped convicts in the 1820s. According to Constance Petrie in Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland 1904, her grandfather, Andrew Petrie, first discovered the tree and gave some specimens to Bidwill who sent them to England where the tree was named after the botanist, rather than Petrie.

The bunya is endemic to Queensland, being found in the south-east of the state and in two small stands in the far north. The tree is thought to have a life span of 600 years; it occurs naturally on basaltic soils and in areas where the annual rainfall is greater than 1000 mm. The conifers are considered to be very ancient with relatives dating back to the Jurassic period, 175 million years ago. The tree can grow to a height of 45 metres with a diameter of 1.5 metres while the branches form the shape of a dome.

Every three years, the bunya pines produce an abundant crop of nuts packed into a cone bigger than a man’s head, and capable of cracking the head if it happens to interfere with the cone’s descent when it eventually falls from a high limb. Roasted in the coals, the nut is delicious and the Aboriginal people loved it. The Aborigines considered the “bon-yi” as they called it as sacred. When a multitude of nascent cones appeared on the trees, messengers were sent far and wide to invite everyone to a great feast in the Bunya Mountains and the Blackall Range. Each tree was owned by an individual and no one      else was allowed to harvest the nuts; the “owner” would climb the tree using a vine and toe holes cut in the trunk though Tom Petrie said that the Aborigines would never have cut a tree and only used a vine to climb. People came from as far south as northern New South Wales and north to Bundaberg, numbering 600 to 700 in the Blackall Range but perhaps in their thousands in the Bunya Mountains. The nutritious nut was eaten either raw or roasted, though it was not the only food eaten during the festival.

Paddy Jerome, Jarowair elder and Bunya Mountains custodian, underlines the importance of the Bunya Mountains and the bunya pine to the Aboriginal people:

The Bunya Mountains, that means our Mothers’ breast – Boobarran Ngummin. This is a very sacred place. To us it is equal in status to Uluru. To all the tribes of South-East Queensland and Northern New South Wales it has been very significant, in fact for thousands of years, perhaps 60 000 years and that’s a long, long time. Our people would gather at the Bunya Mountains from these areas. It is very important that we get the right perspective on these gatherings. Some people think it was just to gorge on bunya nuts. No, it was very deeply spiritual arousing of ceremony. We went to suck the breast of our Mother, who gave us this, the spirituality that was so intense that it was part of our bearing in this country, our Mother Australia, the Earth. We are sucking the breast, sucking the milk, the bunya nut, from her.

(Photo by Dgies)

The festival was a huge celebration featuring corroborees, exchange of news, trade, marriage arrangements and fighting. Popular belief held that the Aborigines were cannibals and would feast on those who died in the fights or from disease and old age; some people went as far as to say that they made sacrifices as well.

There seem to be few written accounts or legends about the bunya; the only legends found were presented by John Mathew in Two Representative Tribes of Queensland, 1910:

The Rivals

The Bonyi (bunya) and the Kuloloi (cypress pine) being rivals, at one time had a great fight…Then they began to fight and Bonyi speared Kuloloi low down, hence all its lower branches are like spears. As for Bonyi, it was speared high up, which accounts for the lower part of the stem being clear of branches to this day.

The Revengeful Lover, or How the Nicks Came on the Wild Plum

There was once a Bonyi that fell in love with a dainty little tree called Kulvain, which bore a bluish-black fruit like a plum. So he went to Kulvain’s father thinking he had only to ask and the girl would be his and he said unceremoniously…[ The father refuses and Bonyi is enraged] Bonyi then slashed away at Kulvain’s father, and that is why the fruit of the Kulvain is marked all over with nicks at the present day.

The widely available scientific details about the bunya pine are indisputable for the most part. That the bunya is ancient seems beyond doubt; however the facts concerning its evolution are contentious due to the difficulty of obtaining exact information from fossils. Tests done on the nut show it to be a rich source of carbohydrates, and therefore confirm its importance as a seasonal food source to the Aborigines. Scientific knowledge of the bunya is of great help to westerners in a pragmatic sense. Yet the doors are closed on the metaphysical aspects of Indigenous knowledge, which are deemed beyond the realm of scientific endeavour and therefore of little significance. Perhaps the most important document concerning Aboriginal contact with the bunya is Constance Petrie’s recording of her father’s experiences. His eyewitness account of the actual festival is of great value as a historical record, though there may be some inaccuracies due to Petrie’s memory of events.

There is much more scientific information than Indigenous knowledge regarding the bunya. It could be argued that westerners are obsessed by detail and that we have the technology and means to satisfy our curiosity. Science is only interested in instrumental values and the benefits that can be gained from knowing something scientifically as opposed to the Aborigines who venerate nature for its intrinsic value as well. The dispersal of the Aborigines led to the demise of the bunya festival towards the end of the nineteenth century. Aboriginal knowledge and tradition was handed down orally from generation to generation; the destruction wrought by the colonists on Aboriginal society has meant that much knowledge has been lost. Much Indigenous knowledge is secret, only available to initiates and therefore beyond the reach of westerners.

Tom Petrie passed away in 1910 and was honoured the following year when the Governor of Queensland, Sir William MacGregor unveiled a monument in his memory. At the same time, the name of the township that had grown where Tom had settled some fifty years earlier was changed from North Pine to Petrie. Many people in the area were opposed to the change and the debate raged in the community for years afterwards.
When first erected, the monument stood about fifty metres from the School of Arts on the opposite side of Redcliffe Rd. The 15 ft 6 in. (5 metres) high structure consisted of a sandstone obelisk with a marble tablet set into its surface on which Tom Petrie’s epitaph was inscribed: “Pioneer, Patriot, Philanthropist.” A stone water trough connected to a nearby windmill lay alongside the monument. A tap and small bowl on one side allowed people to drink. The monument has since been moved and now stands in front of the School of Arts building.
The inscription on the monument is as follows:

TO
HONOUR THE MEMORY OF
TOM PETRIE
(1831 – 1910)
AND TO COMMEMORATE
HIS GREAT SERVICES TO QUEENSLAND
AS
PIONEER, PATRIOT, PHILANTHROPIST,
THIS MONUMENT WAS REARED BY
AFFECTIONATE FRIENDS AND ADMIRERS
AND UNVEILED
ON JULY 15TH 1911,
BY HIS EXCELLENCY
SIR WILLIAM MACGREGOR, C.C.M.C., C.B.

North Pine School of Arts

I will be talking about Turrwan in Moreton Bay Region libraries at the following venues and dates:

Albany Creek Library, Monday 14 September 2015, 10.00am
Woodford Library, Friday 18 September 2015, 1.30pm
Deception Bay Library, Thursday 01 October 2015, 10.00am
North Lakes Library, Wednesday 07 October 2015, 1.00pm
Bribie Island Library, Tuesday 13 October 2015, 10.00am
Caboolture Library, Wednesday 21 October 2015, 10.00am

For more details go to Moreton Bay.

Almost a year has flown by since I wrote a post called “A New Direction: Revisiting the Petries” where I announced my intention of writing a sequel to Turrwan. I have just put the finishing touches to the manuscript I have called Red Gold which continues the story of Tom Petrie and his family from the early 1860s to the 1920s. I have created a couple of nasty villains to persecute the family across the generations and continue where Grayson left off. I am now waiting on some professional beta readers to send me their feedback before submitting it to publishers.
This time I have included a map of South East Queensland in Red Gold to make it easier for those readers who do not know the area to situate the action. I searched all over for an appropriate map but found nothing and decided to create one myself. I loved making maps as a kid at school and used techniques I had learned then to trace an outline of the coast and rivers which I scanned into Photoshop. With the help of my son, Shane, we made the map above.

The relationship between blacks and whites on the early Queensland frontier is a major theme of Turrwan, so I was delighted when historian Libby Connors published Warrior earlier this year. Connors’ work is a significant contribution to this state’s historical record and while non-fiction may not be everyone’s cup of tea, I can thoroughly recommend Warrior if you are an amateur of Australia’s past and the “non-war” the Aboriginal people waged against the invaders of their country.

Connors explains how the different tribal groups of South-east Queensland interacted and reacted to the white presence on their lands. She points out that British policy was to treat the Indigenous people as citizens of the empire and therefore subject to colonial law. However, the majority of politicians, bureaucrats and ordinary citizens were incapable of recognising, let alone understanding, that the native peoples had their own system of traditional law with all-encompassing guidelines that had to be followed. Neither could the Aboriginal people understand the whites who came unbidden to their lands, an unthinkable breach of etiquette under Indigenous law.

With the closing of the penal colony and the opening of Brisbane to the general public in 1842 came an influx of new settlers which led to an increase in conflicts between the opposing factors. Dundalli, the central figure in Warrior, was a Dalla man from the Blackall Range inland from the Sunshine Coast. He was a lawman given the task of resisting the invaders and organising payback for crimes committed by the whites against his people. The notion of payback is central to Aboriginal thinking as it preserves the carefully constructed balance of their culture and society. If harmony is not restored through an act of retribution, the door to chaos and the disintegration of their way of life is thrown open.

Connors skilfully outlines Aboriginal and white politics, highlighting the conflicts between the different Aboriginal groups themselves and how this led to certain tribes using the whites to punish their traditional enemies. Dundalli was a big, powerful man greatly feared by both the whites and the Brisbane Aboriginal people – it was a member of this last group who eventually betrayed Dundalli to the police. Dundalli, a hero to the Aboriginal people to the north of Brisbane, was arrested and imprisoned for six months before being brought to trial. Evidence of a dubious nature was presented and deemed enough to sentence him to death. He was hung in Queen St where the GPO stands today, exhorting his people to exact revenge on the man who denounced him.

Life on Queensland’s early frontier was fraught with uncertainty and danger, fear and violence. Connors has done a wonderful job of unravelling the complexities and nuances of the white invasion and Aboriginal resistance, the writing is fluent, the narrative compelling.

PS I had to smile when I saw the cover for Warrior as I had thought to use this same watercolour by Conrad Martens for Turrwan.

Many writers fled Brisbane during the Joh Bjelke-Petersen era (1968–87). Queensland has been represented in the past as a cultureless backwater inhabited by rednecks. The state was perceived as being of no interest, a rural backward society caught between its violent frontier past and an artificial present. However, this negative image, while still valid for some, has changed radically since the World Expo in 1988 and the demise of Bjelke-Petersen. By the end of the twentieth century Brisbane had begun to reposition itself as a cosmopolitan city with a healthy cultural base.

A number of factors have also contributed to this transformation. The population has increased through migration, Queensland’s image as a tourist destination has been enhanced through sophisticated marketing and the government has invested in cultural organisations and practitioners. At the same time, Queensland writers such as Venero Armmano, John Birmingham, Nick Earls, Andrew McGahan and Simon Cleary among many others have played a central role in changing how Brisbane is perceived. For McGahan, the city is far from ugly. In his novel, 1988, he describes his return after a stint in the north:

The glow in the sky. Orange streetlights. Outlying suburbs. It was beautiful. The highway turned onto the six-lane arterial. We came in through Oxley and Annerly, flowing with the traffic. Then the city highrises were in view, alight, multi-coloured. Brisbane. It was impossibly beautiful.

The negative qualities of Brisbane, as portrayed by writers like Malouf in Johhno, have been refigured by other writers, and Malouf himself, so as to portray Brisbane in a positive way. One transformation in particular was how the old wooden houses became to represent all that was good about the city. The “Queenslander,” as the house is known, was epitomised in Malouf’s 12 Edmonstone Street (1985), where he describes the building as “a one-storeyed weatherboard, a style of house so common then as to be quite unremarkable; Brisbane was a one-storeyed weatherboard town”.

Contemporary writers may be reconfiguring Brisbane in a positive manner, but the question still remains of why so few historical novels have been written about the colonial era in Brisbane. Is it due to a collective will to forget the early history of Queensland, especially the “birthstain” of the penal colony and the desire of emancipists and their descendants to hide their convict origins? This denial of our convict past was deepened by a desire to forget the way early settlers treated the Aboriginal people—the massacres, the poisonings, the diseases. The frontier violence in Queensland has been replaced by the notion of the brave pioneer taming a wild country and has been collectively forgotten in the same way as our convict past has. Australians are unwilling to treat with this period because they would need to look deep within themselves and confront the demons that are unleashed when one people dispossesses another.

Even so, since the 1970s, more and more family historians have been searching the archives and discovering convicts in the family tree. Now people are accepting their convict ancestry to the point that it has become a badge of honour for some. We are also beginning to recognise and acknowledge the suffering the whites caused in their early interactions with the Indigenous people of Australia. Then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s “Apology to the Stolen Generations” in 2008 is one example.

And has literature itself unwittingly played a role in putting novelists off? Indeed, as we have seen, a thread of negative images of the city runs through the novels discussed in earlier articles, from The Curse in 1894, which depicts a city in decay, to the myth of the hostile country portrayed in Penton’s Landtakers and then the city concealing its past in the follow-up Inheritors. The line continues through the works of Malouf: Johnno, Anderson: Tirra Lira and Astley: Reading, who paint Brisbane as uninteresting, a place to flee from. Does this sense of Brisbane as not worthy of attention still haunt the collective subconscious and reinforce the desire to forget the city’s past? Nick Earls, author of Zigzag Street (1996), which is set in Brisbane, says that, “[f]or years I wrote things and deliberately avoided setting them in South-East Queensland because people didn’t seem to do that and the area didn’t seem to be regarded as worthy of carrying a story.”

And so our writers escape from Brisbane to look elsewhere for their stories. Two contemporary historical novelists who have lived in or around Brisbane have turned towards the “old country” to tell their tales. Kate Morton has chosen to set her novels in England, flitting back and forth from the present to the first half of the twentieth century, beginning with The House at Riverton/The Shifting Fog (2006) through to The Secret Keeper (2012). M. K. Hume, who grew up in Ipswich, is consumed by ancient history which, as she says on her website, she “loved to teach . . . using stories to bring the ancient world to life for my students.” Hume has written two trilogies centred on her “first love, King Arthur, and the legends of the Arthuriad.” It seems the wonders of our distant ancestors in Europe are more attractive to writers than what happened in Brisbane in its early days. That is quite understandable, but more and more people want to learn about Brisbane’s past. However, only time will tell whether or not historical novelists turn their eye to the colonial era and do justice to the city. Brisbane has changed much since those far-off days of a tiny settlement tucked into a bend in the river and ringed with an endless sea of vegetation and later its image as a cultureless backwater where nothing ever happened. Now the city has begun to embrace its past more than ever and has become a place to move to, not to escape from.

The overall survey shows a common thread in the early writings from Praed through to Penton. Whiteness is either questioned or affirmed, while inter-racial relations on the frontier and in the city explored. A number of these works, White or Yellow? in particular, raise questions of national identity. Another thread links novels written in more recent times, from Malouf to Cleary. In these works, the built environment features along with the landscape and Brisbane takes on character as a place in the hearts and minds of its inhabitants. Anderson and Shaw represent yet another strand of novelists (to which I belong), whose “settler accounts,” like Penton, take place in colonial times and explore various aspects of the period. What stands out in many of these works is the way the river is depicted as defining the city, an essential part of its character.

Turrwan has little in common with some of the early works set in Brisbane, especially White or Yellow? and The Curse. However, like many of the works cited in this analysis, Turrwan explores relationships between Black and White on Queensland’s frontier. In contrast, Anderson’s The Commandant makes little reference to the Aboriginal people except as a vague presence until the murder of Logan. Yet, there is a similarity between my work and Anderson’s in that we both use fictive characters who confront well-known historical figures. Despite the fictional content, I, like Anderson, have strived to respect the historical record. Barry states that in The Commandant, “[t]here is great authenticity in the factual background of the novel.” However, as we saw earlier, Penton was wrong with the dates in Landtakers, and as shown earlier, Shaw was inaccurate with historical details in Mango Hill. These may simply have been details overlooked by the authors, but it does reflect negatively on the historical veracity of the works.

From the foregoing, it is clear that Australian fiction writers have neglected the early history of Brisbane and that my novel could help fill this gap. No historical novels have been set entirely in Brisbane and its surrounds in the period covered in Turrwan, that is, from 1830 to 1862.

So novelists, to your pens.

Eliza Fraser’s survival and rescue after being ship-wrecked on the island that carries her husband’s name are well-documented. The historical record shows that the Petries met Eliza and her husband Captain James Fraser on the Stirling Castle on the way to Australia from Scotland in 1831. In Turrwan I recount that Mary Petrie and Eliza became friends on the long voyage to Sydney. What follows is a section I cut from the book as it was getting too far away from the main storyline. Tom Petrie is with his mother Mary saying goodbye to the Frasers as they set out on their ill-fated voyage.

Eliza Fraser would also lose a baby, and more, several years after our arrival in Sydney. On a bright sunny day in 1836 I went to the wharf with Mother to say goodbye to the Frasers, who were sailing with the tide on the Stirling Castle, the same boat that had brought us from Scotland. In the midst of the bustle, Mother embraced Eliza awkwardly, the girl’s huge belly getting in the way. The tears flowed freely as the two women parted.

“Now you take care of yourself and the little one, you hear?” Mother ordered between sobs.

“You’re a born worrier, Mary. Everything will be just fine, you’ll see,” said Eliza, trying to lighten her departure. But everything would not be fine.

Eliza’s husband James stood beside her. Some twenty years her senior, he was in poor health and looked like an old man. He was extremely thin and wiry; Mother wondered how he wasn’t blown away when he was on deck. His dark mahogany face wore the signs of an unknown disease he had caught on one of his voyages to the southern seas. How he managed to run the ship was another mystery to Mother until she knew the man better. Fraser had a will of steel and had learned to live with the aches, pains and limitations of his malady. He still had his sea legs though and they carried him on his daily rounds of the ship. His second in command was a competent mariner and could be trusted to keep the ship in good order and on course.

James tried to spend as much time as he could spare with his beautiful young wife, still surprised that she had chosen to marry him when she had the pick of some of the most eligible bachelors in the land. Mother had asked herself the same question when she was introduced to Eliza at the Captain’s table on the Stirling Castle.

Eliza detached herself from Mary and waddled up the gangplank on the arm of her spouse, who ordered the crew to cast off as soon as his feet hit the deck; the tide would not wait. Mother wrung her hands on the dock, unable to shrug off the sense of uneasiness she felt about this trip. The boat drifted with the current, men scurrying aloft in the rigging, the sails unfurling with a flap in the light breeze. Eliza gave a last wave to the blurry figures on the wharf and turned to see the ship thrusting towards the Heads and the open sea.

Mother heard the full story of what happened next from Eliza when she eventually returned to Sydney. On their way north they called in at Dunwich on Stradbroke Island to offload some supplies for the settlement at Brisbane. A few days after leaving Moreton Bay, the Stirling Castle ran into a storm. Eliza was propped in her bunk, surrounded by cushions as the ship heaved and slewed, at times falling through the air to slam with a terrific thud on the surface of the ocean. Eliza thought they would all drown, but the sturdy boat managed to rise again on the next wave. Fixed to the foot of the bed was a bucket that Eliza had used until there was nothing left to bring up, her retching upsetting her baby, who pommelled her insides in protest.

Captain Fraser was also bedridden, assailed by an excruciating headache, when he felt the sickening crunch of the hull against the unforgiving jagged reef. He leapt to his feet, the pain forgotten as he donned his vest and struggled to his wife’s side. Eliza’s eyes were wide with terror as James made a feeble attempt to reassure her that the ship was solid. Then he cried “I have to go aloft,” and staggered out of the cabin.

“There was nuthin’ I could do Cap’n,” the mate bewailed when Fraser joined him at the wheel. “The bloody wind is too strong and has blown us way off course,” he went on, assuming no blame for their dire situation.

With an unearthly wrenching sound, the mainmast snapped and plunged into the sea, dragging the ship dangerously low in the water. The pounding waves would soon make mincemeat of their craft which was firmly wedged on the reef, Fraser decided.

“Ready the lifeboats, man. And get the crew on deck. Be quick about it, we don’t have much time.”

With the aid of a sailor, Fraser managed to manoeuvre his badly afflicted wife into one of the longboats where she cowered between the seats in a grey huddle as the rain lashed her face. Against the odds, most of the crew got off the doomed ship. As the storm abated, they set sail towards the south.

The first contractions shook Eliza when the lifeboat hit the water and bobbed like a cork in the tempest. In the small flimsy craft, Eliza gave birth surrounded by her husband and his crew. Her cries of pain were lost in the sea, the men silent and afraid, haunted by their own terrors, which the obvious distress of the woman heightened even further. They were all relieved when the child was finally born, the captain bravely adopting the role of midwife. Eliza was exhausted by the labour and the stress of the wreck. Her milk dried up and the poor baby died in its second day. The tiny body was wrapped in a cloth and confined to the deep.

Eliza was delirious when they came ashore on a long wide beach fringed with thick lush vegetation. The island on which they had landed would later be named after her husband who was either killed by the blacks or died naturally, no one seems to know. Eliza spent several months with the aboriginals before she was rescued and brought back to civilisation.

Two novels of note with Brisbane as the setting were published in the decade following Vance Palmer’s works (see earlier post “Brisbane: A Prison Within a Prison”): The Delinquents (1962) by Criena Rohan/Deirdre Cash set in the early 1960s, and The Slow Natives (1965) by Thea Astley set in the late 1950s. The Delinquents is a work of social realism that explores the experiences of two young lovers, teen rebellion and sexual promiscuity in the experimental years of the 1960s. The couple share an old Queenslander in the West End in Brisbane and the authenticity of life in an Australian city nearly a half century earlier is a feature of the book.

David Malouf’s Johnno (1975) describes the Brisbane of the author’s childhood in the post war years and is now perceived as the quintessential novel about Brisbane. Malouf, speaking of Johnno in the 2000 Neustadt Lecture, reinforces the notion of an under-represented Brisbane in literature and outlines his reason for writing about the city:

It was about growing up in my hometown, Brisbane, a place that for some reason had never till then got itself into a book—or not anyway in a form that had brought it alive in people’s minds and stuck. I wanted to put it on the map; to make it, in all its particularity, a place that would exist powerfully in the lives of readers in the same way that Dickens’s London does, or Dostoevsky’s Petersburg. (“A Writing Life”)

However, throughout Johnno, Malouf paints an unsightly picture of Brisbane, which Dante, the narrator, describes as “a place where nothing happened, and where nothing ever would happen, because it had no soul. People suffered here without significance. It was too mediocre even to be a province of hell” (118). Brisbane was a place to escape from, as Dante, Johnno and their friends do, with many of them going to Europe, which Malouf implies is better than Australia.

Johnno set the stage for the way the city was portrayed by writers in the years to follow. Since Malouf, numerous novels have been set in Brisbane, with many, such as Jessica Anderson in Tirra Lirra by the River (1978) and Thea Astley in Reaching Tin River (1990), depicting the city as backward and uninteresting, a place “to escape” from.

Malouf’s influence is still evident in one of the most recent books to feature Brisbane, Simon Cleary’s The Comfort of Figs (2008), where the author has continued in Malouf’s footsteps. Cleary’s novel is set in the present but is in part historical as it also depicts the period surrounding the construction of the bridge in the late 1930s. The Comfort of Figs is a love story and explores themes of forgiveness and self-understanding. At the start, young Canadian Freya Adams is slowly discovering the hidden layers of the city through her lover, Robbie O’Hara. The following is how she sees “her adopted town” not long after she meets Robbie:

A city of a million and a half, stretching, growing. A city reaching further outwards, towards the bays and the forests and the mountain ranges she’d glimpsed from the airplane window, but couldn’t grasp when she first flew in. So much water, so many trees, so many ridge-lines. A developing city, and a place of rough politics, hard to detect. A city shaking off the past it seems half-embarrassed by. (16)

The last sentence of this extract reflects Penton’s portrayal of Brisbane towards the end of the nineteenth century in Inheritors (1936). This inability to deal with the past, according to Cleary, is still present in the twenty-first century.

Like Johnno, Jessica Anderson’s The Commandant was published in 1975, and is the first historical novel to be set principally in Brisbane. However, it is restricted to the period surrounding Captain Logan’s death in 1830. Anderson describes the arrival in Brisbane of Frances O’Beirne, the seventeen year old fictitious sister of Logan’s wife Letty:

Again they were rounding a long point defined by the winding of the river. The gardens lay on its eastern side, and when they left them behind, and came within sight of the western bank, Frances, like Amelia herself, brought up her hands and clapped them. The row of houses set in gardens, the smoking chimneys, the tall flagstaff and spirited fluttering flag, the barge crossing the river, the windmill on the hill. The cluster of people on the wharf, all this seemed to her the essence of homeliness and familiarity. (35)

The sense of welcome expressed here by O’Beirne differs sharply to the shabbiness evoked by Penton in Landtakers set some fourteen years after The Commandant.

In The Commandant, Anderson has woven fictional characters into a historical account of life in Moreton Bay Penal Colony—as I have done in Turrwan—in 1830. By that time, Commandant Patrick Logan had gained a reputation as a harsh disciplinarian hated by the convicts under his rule. Anderson uses Frances—a somewhat naïve humanitarian—along with others such as Dr Cowper (a historical figure) to provide an insight into Logan and the workings of the settlement where they are all prisoners. Despite Frances’s early positive depiction of the colony, it was still a place to escape from, as many convicts did. In speaking of Moreton Bay Penal Colony, Mamie O’Keefe claims that,

[o]f the approximately 2062 men, 504 are known to have absconded, many of them more than once, over 700 separate abscondings in all. This is more than equivalent to one man in every three going once, and even though most of the absences were brief it clearly provided the authorities with a problem, to which various solutions were proposed.

The desire to flee Brisbane, as expressed in many novels set in the city, is perhaps, in part, an ingrained remnant, a persistent leftover from the convict era where escape was on the minds of a great number of prisoners.

TURRWAN

Richard J Carroll

A thoroughly Australian tale of coming of age, adventure, love, and payback, based on the real-life figure of Tom Petrie, and set against the historical background of colonial Australia.

6.15pm Thursday March 12

FREE event with complimentary refreshments

Mary Ryan’s Milton

Park Rd, Milton

Please RSVP to the

bookshop on 3510 5000

The following review has just been posted on the website Throw the book at us.