What follows is a short section that I deleted from Turrwan in a bid to push the story along and not be distracted by too much historical detail. The passage is recounted by Tom Petrie.

“There are sixty licensed hotels and over a hundred illicit grog sellers in Sydney town, it’s outrageous!” Lang had once preached to my father. “It is our moral duty to stem the tide of debauchery that plagues the colonies,” he proclaimed. I met him often when I was older and I can imagine the stiff back, the chest puffed out, head held high, hands grasping the lapels of his vest. He had a strong yet gentle face, the slightly pointed nose adorned with steel-rimmed spectacles that seemed to magnify his implacable gaze. His brown hair had receded from the expanse of his forehead, and though short, was surprisingly unruly for such a dapper man. Frail-looking sideburns dived behind the stiff white collar of his shirt, framing cherubic lips and a stubborn chin.

Lang had ensured that conditions on board the Stirling Castle were of a much higher standard than was generally the case for the long journey to the antipodes. Hygiene was important, so was instruction. Throughout the five months of the voyage, Lang’s four assistants, all clergymen, organised the men into classes that covered mathematics, economy and self-improvement, while assuring religious instruction and prayer on the Sabbath. As a measure of the men’s commitment to Lang’s strict moral principles, many of them, father included, signed a pledge of temperance.

The other guests were Lang, Wilhelmina, who was a devout Presbyterian missionary and would marry Lang when they later stopped over at the Cape; at this stage, the Reverend was still wooing her. Beside Lang sat his master builder George Ferguson and his wife Margaret.

The Reverend Lang had arrived in Sydney in 1824 and built the Scots Church in the notorious Rocks area, whose narrow, dusty, ill-lit streets were infested with the worst kind of characters who would slit your throat for a penny. Lang certainly didn’t lack courage or conviction and would need these qualities to face the controversy he stirred with the construction of his college.

Before that though, in October 1831 when the Stirling Castle docked in Sydney Harbour, the emigrants were greeted with enthusiasm by the press, with the Sydney Gazette claiming it was “the most important importation the colony has ever received.”

Lang’s project came under criticism from emancipists, mostly of Irish and English descent; they had little in common with the skilled Scottish craftsmen who were much better educated than the majority of Sydney’s citizens and regarded themselves somewhat further up the social ladder than the ex-convicts and their descendants. The emancipists wanted to build their own college but couldn’t get funds or labour from the government and were therefore jealous of Lang. Groups of surly locals often sneered and even spat at the men from the Stirling Castle as they walked from their homes to work on the college. Father remembered one day when one loud-mouth had shouted: “There go those bloody emigrants who have come out to take the country from us.” It could not have been easy for my father whose humanitarian instincts would have perhaps sympathised with the plight of those who had lost their jobs to the Scottish contingent.

Click Lang for more.

We caught our first glimpse of the Tower as we drove into Allevard-les-Bains, a small town nestled in a valley at the foot of the Alps in Isère. The Tour du Treuil is an imposing medieval structure on a knoll on the western slope of the valley, from where it presides over the surrounding countryside with an unflinching eye. Originally built in the twelfth century as a fortress from which the ruling powers could observe the traffic through the valley below, the tower has had many uses over the centuries, one of which was housing Russian refugees during the Second World War. Fortunately, Rose and I weren’t refugees, we were guests of the present owners, our Australian friends, Chris and Suzanne Carroll (no relation), who bought the tower in 2010.
From our room on the third floor, reached by a lift no less (or a narrow staircase, legs permitting), we could see the Gleyzin glacier (2697 m.) and snow-covered mountains framed in the massive window. We quickly settled in, then set off to tour the premises.

To celebrate our arrival, our hosts had invited their neighbours Louis and Colette for dinner on the terrace. While drinking an aperitif, we indulged in a game of croquet, with Chris explaining the rules. I had never played and didn’t realise just how cut-throat croquet could be. We blasted each others’ balls around the grass or into the bushes in our surge to the winning post. With the game over, Louis suggested a round of petanque, to be played with square balls.

“Square balls?” I enquired, not quite managing to keep a note of incredulity from my voice.

“Oui, oui, c’est vrai; des boules carrées,” (Yes, yes, it’s true; square balls) Louis assured me, a twinkle in his eye. “Because of the hills. If we play with round balls, they disappear down the slopes, never to be seen again. So, we use square ones instead and the problem is solved, no?” he added with a wink that did little to dissipate the feeling he was taking me for a ride.

“I’m willing to give it a try,” I responded, not sure how this would end.

Colette scurried off to her house to fetch the said balls and arrived back carrying a bucket, which she deposited at my feet. “Voila, we can start,” she exclaimed, standing with her hands on her hips and a knowing look in her eye. I observed that the balls were indeed square, or more correctly, cubic, numbered in pairs. I plucked one from the bucket and studied it closely. “10 cm by 10 cm by 10 cm and made from pine,” Louis instructed proudly.

This is a whole new ball game, I thought.

The “ball” certainly felt different in the hand, much lighter by far than the usual steel spheres, but the game was the same. You chuck the thing and hope it lands closer to the jack than the opposition’s balls. I quickly learnt that if the “ball” landed on a corner, whether on the grass or gravel, it would invariably bounce and take off like a rocket into the nearest bush. We all got the hang of it and were soon into the fun of the game, square balls ricocheting in all directions, the tower seemingly watching all that transpired at its feet in benevolent tolerance. The pastis warmed my blood, while the verdant valley and forested hills stood as backdrops to a balmy French evening.

What follows is a modified extract from the introduction to my PhD thesis.

Tom Petrie

Let no one say the past is dead.
The past is all about us and within.
Haunted by tribal memories, I know
This little now, this accidental present
Is not the all of me, whose long making
Is so much of the past.

Oodgeroo Noonuccal — ‘The Past’, in The Dawn is at Hand: Poems by Kath Walker 1966

The fiction begins where my research can’t find or verify any more facts.

James Alexander Thom — The Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction 2010

I first became interested in Tom Petrie while studying for my undergraduate degree at the University of Queensland. Research for one of my courses led me to Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland (hereafter referred to as Reminiscences), written by his daughter Constance and published in 1904. I was fascinated by Tom’s life in the fledgling colony at Moreton Bay, which was home to some of the worst convicts in Australia, an isolated outpost surrounded by thick bush inhabited by Indigenous people.

As a writer and researcher, I had to ask myself what my motivations were for writing this particular narrative. I think Tom Petrie’s story is an important part of Queensland’s history and I want to make it accessible to a wider audience than that reached by Reminiscences. Through Turrwan (“great man” in the Turrbal language), I would like to give readers an opportunity to become more aware of Queensland’s Indigenous heritage as well as that of its white population. Like most writers, I hope my book will be widely read by the general public and perhaps also used as an educational tool in the classroom.

The Petrie family played an important part in the development of south-east Queensland. Tom’s father Andrew was the superintendent of works for the penal colony, the first free settler and a major builder in the new town, while Tom’s elder brother John became the first mayor of Brisbane in 1859. Tom himself acted as guide, messenger, interpreter, explorer, timber cutter and surveyor for the white settlement, and established Murrumba in the North Pine area where the town of Petrie was later named after him.

The history of Australian colonisation and the treatment of the original inhabitants of the country remain points of contention often bitterly debated, as in the so-called “history wars.” Historians such as Keith Windschuttle and Henry Reynolds defend opposing positions regarding, in particular, the massacres perpetrated by the whites, either denying (Windschuttle) or acknowledging (Reynolds) the events. My work attempts to go beyond the bare facts of the conflict by letting the characters and events tell the story. Kate Grenville, in her comments about her book, The Secret River, expresses how I see my own work:

It stands outside that polarised conflict and says look, this is a problem we really need, as a nation, we need to come to grips with. The historians are doing their thing, but let me as a novelist come to it in a different way, which is the way of empathising and imaginative understanding of those difficult events.

Turrwan is timely as increasing numbers of Queenslanders want to learn about our state’s past. The large audience at the panel discussion, “Does Heritage have a Future?” at the State Library of Queensland on the 24^th October 2012, was a measure of the thirst Queenslanders and all Australians have for our heritage.

I came to writing late and it took a five-day intensive workshop in a beautiful remote setting in the south of France to unlock the shackles and to let the words find their way onto the page. I started out with poetry, then moved to non-fiction and most recently my first novel Turrwan, set in and around Brisbane in the nineteenth century.

While researching a cover for my novel I discovered some of Australia’s early artists including Conrad Martens and his ‘Brisbane 1855’ above. If you happen to be in Brisbane you could check his work out at ‘Transparent: Watercolour in Queensland 1850s – 1980s’ which is on at the Qld Art Gallery until 20 July 2014. Martens was an English-born landscape artist who sailed with Charles Darwin on the second voyage of HMS Beagle along the South American coast towards the end of 1833. He sailed to Sydney via Tahiti in 1835. After initial success his fortunes were hampered by economical downturn in the colony due to drought. He came to Brisbane in 1851 then eventually travelled back to Sydney via the Darling Downs, staying with squatters and pastoralists along the way.

In the end I decided I needed a picture that reflected more of the central theme of the book, that is, the conflict between black and white on the colonial frontier. The image I finally chose is a detail from ‘Attack on a Settler’s Hut’ which appeared as a plate in James Bonwick’s The Last of the Tasmanians (1870); however, it is not known whether Bonwick was the artist or not.

Attack on a Settler’s Hut

Although the action in the image is set in Tasmania and not Queensland I thought it was an appropriate reflection of the conflict of the time. It also has some similarities to a scene in Turrwan.

After the long journey through researching and writing a PhD thesis I am now ready to plunge back into the real world to concentrate on publishing some of my work and to get stuck into some new projects. My novel Turrwan is now on sale as a paperback through FeedARead.com and should be available on other sites such as Amazon, Book Depository etc. in a few weeks time. I am currently working on the ebook version which will be out soon on Kindle. I am also planning to publish At the Feet of a Giant, my memoir set in Provence in the south of France as an ebook once it’s finished.

Mt Ventoux

I’ve been going back over my notes for another novel, this time set in the coal-mining ghost town of Mt Mulligan about 100 km due west of Cairns in Far North Queensland where I spent the first four years of my life until the mine was closed down in 1957. The mountain, Ngarrabullgan as it is known to the Kuku Djungan, is one of the most sacred and oldest sites in Queensland with proof of human habitation dating back 40,000 years. What the local Aboriginal people know as the birthplace of the Rainbow Serpent is a tabletop mountain 18 km long by 6.5 km wide and rising between 200 to 400 metres above the surrounding countryside. In 1876, intrepid explorer James Venture Mulligan discovered payable gold along the Hodgkinson River which flows along the eastern flank of the monolith (ten times bigger than Uluru). Miners flooded to the area but the field was never as rich as the Palmer to the north. When coal was discovered under the mountain in 1907 the gold had petered out. On a September morning in 1921 a massive explosion rocked the mine resulting in the death of all 75 men working underground at the time. Aboriginal people are supposed to have said that it was retribution for digging into the sacred mountain. The only original building remaining is the hospital which is now the homestead for a working cattle ranch that welcomes visitors. At the turn of the twenty-first century a large marijuana plantation was established to the southwest of nearby Chillagoe, once a thriving smelting town. When Police closed down the operation and arrested those involved they were led to a cache of 8 kg of gold nuggets and $161,000 cash hidden in the old Mulligan mine. This project is still very much in its infancy – much research and planning is in the offing to bring all of these elements together in a compelling story.

Mt Mulligan Map