Melissa Lucashenko

I call them sufferers in the novel.

They're rocked up with their convicts in chains, treated as subhuman basically, as scum, as irredeemable scum.

They're starved and whipped and just treated abominably.

and came here and started talking about the savages which it's it'd be laughable if it wasn't so funny but being funny is you know a big part of the book too it's you can't you can't write about this stuff and um and not find veins of humor in in the ridiculousness of it all

Dundalee was a feared and respected resistance leader, a very tall man.

He was supposed to be about six foot seven from the Dalla people of the Jinnaburra Nation, which is in the Sunshine Coast hinterland.

And he was appointed by the Bunya Mountains Borer, so the Aboriginal Parliament of the day.

He was appointed as the man who would lead the resistance throughout South East Queensland, which at the time was called New South Wales by whites.

And so he was a general, a general in the defence of country.

Yeah, well, he'd spent several years leading the resistance, maybe as long as a decade, I can't quite remember.

But for some reason he was in Brisbane actually doing work.

He was collecting wood or carrying lumber or something in the Fortitude Valley area.

And he was betrayed by some other Aboriginal people who alerted the white authorities that it was him.

So he was captured, I think sent to Sydney and found guilty of, they would have called it murder.

And he was taken out in Queen Street before the assembled white and black soldier and civilian population of the town and hung.

But the hangman was a bloke called Green and he was a former convict himself.

He was a convicted rapist.

And Green had misjudged the length of the rope that was needed for Dunderley.

And so Dunderley strangled horrifically in front of the whole town as the

black population watched from the hill that the windmill stands on which is one of the prominent symbols of colonial Brisbane and that marked the beginning of the end of Aboriginal resistance in southeast Queensland I would argue not the end but the beginning of the end.