Qualla: Thomas Petrie

Thomas Petrie: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kerry Raymond, CC BY 4.0. Tom Petrie was six years old when his family arrived at the raw penal settlement on the Brisbane River in 1837, and he grew up in two worlds at once. The settlement's clerk, a convict, gave him his lessons; the Turrbal people gave him the rest. Allowed to roam freely with Aboriginal children, the boy learned to speak Turrbal, joined hunts and ceremonies, and was trusted in ways almost no other settler ever managed. He saw the brutality of the frontier up close, the floggings on Queen Street, men labouring in chains, and the colony's first hangings. But he also saw a culture from the inside, and what he absorbed as a child would, decades later, become one of the few records of Aboriginal Brisbane written by someone who had actually lived it.

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Image: Kerry Raymond | CC BY 4.0

Thomas Petrie: The Bunya Feast

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. When Petrie was fourteen, the Turrbal elder Dalaipi took him on a journey that few outsiders ever witnessed. Every third year, when the great bunya pines of the ranges bore a heavy crop of cones, the Aboriginal peoples of southeast Queensland gathered in their hundreds for a feas...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Thomas Petrie: Murrumba, the Good Place

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. In 1859 Petrie married Elizabeth Campbell and went looking for land of his own, and even this he did differently. Rather than simply taking up a run, he asked Dalaipi's advice. The elder's son, Dal-ngang, led him to his people's ancestral country on the North Pine River and offer...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Thomas Petrie: A Witness Who Spoke Up

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. In 1861 Petrie was called before a government committee investigating the Native Police, and his testimony cut against the grain of his time. Where many settlers spoke of Aboriginal people as savages or nuisances, Petrie said plainly that the old Brisbane clans were dying, poison...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Thomas Petrie: His Daughter's Book

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Petrie's deepest legacy was written down by someone else. In 1904 his daughter, Constance Campbell Petrie, published Tom Petrie's Reminiscences of Early Queensland, setting down the stories her father had carried since boyhood: Turrbal words and place names, customs, hunting and ...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain