Tom Petrie's reminiscences of early Queensland (dating from 1837). Recorded by his daughter.

In 1837, a six-year-old boy steps off a ship into the swamplands of Moreton Bay, then a remote convict settlement at the edge of the known world. Sixty-seven years later, his daughter Constance sits beside him and records everything he remembers. What unfolds is a remarkable memoir of a life spent watching Queensland transform from wilderness into a colony, and the Aboriginal people who were there long before anyone thought to call it home. Tom Petrie learned the local dialects, was initiated into Aboriginal ceremonies, and moved between two worlds with an ease that few settlers achieved. His daughter transcribed his recollections in 1904, preserving a child's-eye view of first contact, of traditions still alive but already fading, of a frontier that swallowed its own past. This is history from inside the memory, not from the archives: vivid, personal, and tinged with the sadness of a man who outlived the world he described.