Melissa Lucashenko

Because in the era we're talking about, 1850s, 1860s, the native police were just death squads running riot wherever white pastoralists wanted...

blackfellas killed or rounded up and sent away, but very often killed unlawfully.

And to have a P on your arm and to be able to say, no, I belong to the Maramba Downs, I'm one of Petrie's men, that would have been a kind of protection and a passport.

So, you know, there's... As with all of this historical inquiry...

And cultural inquiry, you can't just stop at first impressions.

If I just stopped and said, oh, Petrie was a bastard who branded his Aboriginal workers, that would have been only a tiny fraction of the story.

You've got to dig deeper.

And so I spent four years through the pandemic, through the bushfires, you know, through the floods, digging deeper.

And, yeah, there's so many fascinating stories.

I could have written three Eden glasses.

One of the first things I learnt was how tiny it was.

Like 1840 to 1855, you're talking about a white population of

between one and maybe 3,000.

It's a tiny, it's basically a village or a cluster of villages around the river, you know, North Brisbane, South Brisbane, Fortitude Valley.

So the size of the place, I was really lucky because I lived in Tonga in 1997 and Nuku'alofa was a small dusty town a long way from the Western world and so that gave me some insights into life in a

a town where there's pigs running all over the dirt roads, where people are living in villages and sometimes congregating in central areas, where the church is incredibly important.

So I think that was a great gift to me as an author to have that experience.

And it was a very violent place, you know.

Again, this... Freud would have a field day.

The British rock up with their...