I have known it all my life—the large, dull, rectangular granite obelisk that marks the exact location at which explorer and NSW Surveyor-General of Lands, John Oxley, set foot on the northern bank of the Brisbane River in 1824 and proclaimed a settlement site. This was the white birthplace of my city, the Caucasian holy ground, and although I had never actually stood before the obelisk, it has always been there for me, somehow, like an unremarkable freckle on the body.
Of sharper relief in the mind’s eye is Oxley himself, just in his early thirties and a devout Christian. His black and white profile—a miniature portrait rendered by an artist unknown—is as familiar to generations of Brisbane children as the A-flat of the City Hall clock chimes, or the feel of summer bitumen heat through the soles of school shoes.
Oxley, it seems, wasn’t the most popular subject of colonial artists. The one image of him I remember from textbooks in the 1960s remains the perpetual reproduction. In the picture he appears almost boyish with his full bottom lip and helmet of pitch-black hair, tufted up in a lick above his forehead. On the left side of his face he has a long, thinning sideburn that hints at a lad straining towards manhood. His left eye looks both sleepy and watchful. Overall, though, he appears to be a good boy. It’s nice to have a good boy as the father of your hometown.
As for the obelisk, it is possibly the most unimaginative foundation stone of any city in the western world: a great two-and-a-half-metre-high lump of grey rock, lazily chiselled and almost entirely featureless. Its back is turned to the river, its front to the North Quay sector of the CBD. Aesthetically, the obelisk says little more than ‘X marks the spot’, a marker in a forgotten children’s fairy story. Screwed into the rock is a plaque that reads: Here John Oxley Landing to Look for Water Discovered the Site of this City. 28th September 1824.
The idea for the obelisk was conceived in 1924 as part of the official Brisbane Centenary celebrations—a moment, according to local chroniclers, temporarily flush with civic pride and affection for the past. It was purchased with leftover money from a State Government fund set up as part of the Centenary celebrations and its commemoration of John Oxley discovering the city. Other monies went into establishing the John Oxley Library.
A beautiful book produced to mark the occasion—the Brisbane Centenary Official Historical Souvenir—opens with an epic poem commissioned for the party. ‘The Brisbane River—Oxley’s Coming, 1823’ was written by local laureate Emily Bulcock (sister of novelist Vance Palmer), who penned much commemorative rhyming verse in the 1920s and 30s. Curiously, the work elucidates Oxley’s first journey up the river in 1823, rather than his second visit the following year, which resulted in the chosen site of the future city. Still, it gives Bulcock the opportunity to exploit the frisson of first contact, to see Brisbane—this Eden—through foreign eyes, and her lyrical narrative swings between the plunder of Paradise and the glory of a built civilisation.
Our lovely stream has fired no poet’s song;
And though long centuries have seen her flow
Her age old past to silence doth belong
Ere Oxley came a hundred years ago.
Bulcock writes of the ‘great white chief’ seeking a stream, storming ‘this Arcady’ and spoiling ‘the dream’. When Oxley arrives, ‘the wild bird of Freedom fled away’. Then, suddenly, there is ‘a sweet young city laughing in the sun’.
And round her, as around Jerusalem,
The circle of the mountains God has set;
Wherein she sparkles, a half-polished gem,
We scarce have wakened to her beauty yet.
Inside the commemorative souvenir is a further account of Oxley’s second journey and the discovery of the settlement site. It notes that Oxley visited the future site of Customs House; however, ‘the first centre of activity…was a little further up the river, and it was close to the position of the Victoria Bridge (near North Quay)—there the chief buildings of the settlement soon began to arise’.
It goes on to congratulate Oxley for his site choice. ‘The river has everything to do with the enduring permanence, growth and prosperity of the city, and it would be a bold man who would deny the prescience, or was it fate, which led Oxley, on his second choice, to fix upon the peninsula which is Brisbane.’
And in the 1924 book—perhaps inspired by Ms Bulcock’s effusiveness—there is wild poetic flourish in the prose. ‘The river always was, and is, a thing of beauty and a joy; one could almost wish that we were pagans, so that we might, as the Romans did, erect statues in appreciation of our river God.’
Jerusalem. The Romans. River gods. The great classical allusions hardly match the stolid lump of surviving granite in Oxley’s name. In those Roaring 20s and Depression 30s days of shovel-nosed trams and fewer cars, the obelisk quite possibly attracted the historically curious with its little skirt of low cast-iron fencing. Frank Hurley, the legendary photographer/explorer/mythologiser, seemed to find it worthy of his lens. In his restless meanderings across the country after World War Two, when he produced endless postcards and souvenir booklets for the major capital cities of Australia, he snapped a well-dressed young couple before the obelisk, standing stiffly and reading the plaque in the early afternoon. They look attired for the theatre, he in his baggy suit, and she in long skirt, mohair short-sleeved top and headscarf.
One recent winter day I too decide to stand on the exact location where Oxley scrambled ashore and founded Brisbane. To get to the obelisk, you must head up Makerston Street from Roma Street until you strike the T-junction with one of the city’s busiest peak hour thoroughfares—also called North Quay. Here, several lanes of traffic feed in from Coronation Drive and Hale Street in the west and funnel traffic either into the CBD or onto the Riverside Expressway heading south. For pedestrians, it is a dead zone of sterile apartment buildings and a police credit union. There is little human traffic here, for the stretch of bitumen fronting the obelisk has been left stranded by the expressway. It is one of those eerie corners of a city that feels to have died. The obelisk itself is halfhidden under a stand of pollution-filthy trees and hemmed in by a steel safety barrier.
Here John Oxley Landing to Look for Water Discovered the Site of this City. What are we to make of this simple, unpunctuated sentence? To a schoolboy it would present as straightforward and logical. But today it seems worded to suggest that the discovery was somehow accidental. That young Oxley stumbled upon the settlement site. He lands, looking for water, before discovering. It makes the discovery sound incidental. A surprise. Not a decision from a visionary, however wet behind the ears.
And there is something else about the iron-forged declaration. The wording seems clumsy, unconfident. There is a tremor of hesitancy about it. Perhaps it’s just the absence of the commas. Perhaps the memorial plaque author is attempting to be in Oxley’s head, a century after the explorer, with water at the forefront of the Surveyor-General’s mind. Water was a priority, but weren’t there other considerations—geography, river access, timber, Indigenous inhabitants? Perhaps the author—a public servant, a member of the local historical society—was under duress with just the parameter space of the plaque with which to work. Still, something doesn’t feel right about it.
At the rear of the dreary granite block is an old brick pipe outlet, and from it pushes a steady stream of water down to a small inlet of large rocks and river mud. From the city’s riverside bicycle and running track it is possible to look up, after decent rainfall, and see water cascade from this outlet. Was it this, a clearly visible stream of fresh water, which lured Oxley to shore? The geography of landfall here would hardly have changed since 1824. While the elevated Riverside Expressway may have steered traffic around the CBD, it has also rendered the riverbank below a no-man’s-land, a time warp, a slice of Brisbane city topography almost prehistoric with its small-eared mangroves and silty mud.
The rocks below the obelisk are black with moisture. The bank is steep. Significantly steep, compared with the banks further south and north. Once at the top of that high ridge what would Oxley have seen? The dense rainforests across the reach of the river at West End with their wild orchids and staghorns? The low ranges and Mount Coot-tha to the west? A heavily wooded expanse of bush that sloped northward, toward the site of the future city hall, which was then a bog, a marsh, a dish of sponged earth teeming with frogs and insects and wild ducks?
He had come, first and foremost, for water to sustain a military garrison. This was not a mission that considered the visual splendour and practicalities of a modern city. This was about punishment, about the no-gooders and potential criminals of the Empire understanding that while Botany Bay might have gone soft on thieves and murderers, there was still somewhere in the colonies that took human corruption very seriously. Moreton Bay, as an idea, had come all the way from London. So the place was born of practicality, of the needs of immediate function and survival. Here, landing to look for water, they stumbled upon the site of a future city, sank pegs into the earth, built government stores, a windmill for convict labour, a prison.
I take some photographs of the obelisk, just like Hurley. I imagine Oxley clambering up those moist banks, through sharp walls of scrub and vine, in his leather shoes, in his velveteen jacket, his hat off, his sidelevers beaded with sweat on that steamy spring afternoon.
And still the wording and location of the obelisk trouble me. In Brisbane, you don’t have occasion to read many monument plaques. We have bronze statues of footballers. We have a space needle owned by a hairdresser, throwing eerie blue beams of light across the river each evening. We have street effigies of swagmen boiling billycans, left over from the World Exposition of 1988. We have electrical power boxes covered in amateur portraits of a former premier. The actual history of the city though is a nameless jigsaw, a book without an index.
So I turn to the works of prominent local historian and Anglican Reverend, John Steele, who publishes as JG Steele. In his book, The Explorers of the Moreton Bay District 1770–1830, he reproduces extensive extracts from Oxley’s Field Books regarding his journey up the Brisbane River in 1824. Oxley writes in his entry for Tuesday, 28 September—the date on our city’s obelisk—’…and we proceeded down the river, landing, about three-quarters of a mile from our sleeping place, to look for water, which we found in abundance and of excellent quality, being at this season a chain of ponds watering a fine valley. The soil good, with timber and a few Pines, by no means an ineligible station for a first settlement up the river.’ Then Oxley sailed his government cutter to the mouth of the river where it flushed into Moreton Bay.
In his footnote attached to the word ‘landing’, Steele writes, ‘probably at Frew Park, Milton. See Truman, op.cit.’
What does he mean, Frew Park, Milton? Frew Park today is a derelict empty inner-city plot of land, the former home of the Milton Tennis Centre and purchased in 1915 by ‘Daddy Frew’, long-time president of the Queensland Lawn Tennis Association. By 1999 Tennis Queensland, crippled with debt, sold the centre to a developer. For months the abandoned tennis courts and wooden stadium became home to vagrants until April the following year when the place was torched by a fourteen-year-old schoolboy. The development never eventuated. Frew Park is a kilometre up the river from the obelisk at North Quay. Landing. The word used on the plaque attached to the obelisk. At Frew Park? And who is Truman?
There is an earlier reference to Truman in a section of the book examining the choice of the site of Brisbane. While Oxley favoured Breakfast Creek as the settlement site (later rejecting it for the quality of the fresh water and strife with local Aborigines), he was also partial—according to those Field Books—to the ‘chain of ponds watering a fine valley’. TC Truman, the passage reveals, ‘convincingly argued’ in a series of articles published in Brisbane’s The Courier-Mail in 1950 that the site of the ‘chain of ponds’ was in fact at Milton. ‘The incident has sometimes been construed as the discovery of the site of Brisbane,’ writes Steele.
So if the discovery of the site of Brisbane was at Milton, what is the obelisk doing at North Quay?
Retrieving the Courier-Mail articles from the newspaper’s microfiche library, I learn that Tom Truman was an academic in the Department of History at the University of Queensland—itself just a little further up the river from Milton, and a place Oxley’s party camped one evening while documenting the river.
The headline for the first part of Truman’s series, published on Saturday, 29 April, 1950, is ‘Rewriting the History of the Birth of Brisbane’. The newspaper is hardly shying away from something momentous here, a revelation, a historic bombshell overlooked for more than 126 years since the conception of the city. ‘The general history of the settlement is well known but there have always been gaps in the story,’ the newspaper says in a break-out box explaining the Truman series.
Truman himself opens with: ‘Things and places that are part of our daily lives and have become tedious through their familiarity, can take on a new interest for us if we know their history.’ Could he be alluding to the dreary obelisk, described by Catholic Archbishop James Duhig, in a speech to a Brisbane Rotary Club in March 1934, as the ‘not imposing’ cairn on the spot where Oxley was said to have landed?
It is not until part three of the serial, published the following Saturday, that Truman rolls out his hand grenade. Could Oxley have actually landed at Milton, and not at North Quay, where the memorial still stands?
Truman spends much of the article reproducing quotes from Oxley’s Field Books, then comes to the entry for 28 September: ‘…and we proceeded down the river, landing, about three-quarters of a mile from our sleeping place, to look for water, which we found in abundance and of excellent quality, being at this season a chain of ponds watering a fine valley.’ Truman opines: ‘These words constitute for Brisbane what Batman’s “This is the spot for a village” is to Melbourne. On this evidence the site for the Oxley memorial on North Quay was fixed. This decision may well have been correct, but doubts Oxley’s actual “landing place about three-quarters of a mile from our sleeping place”.’
For Truman’s hypothesis to be true—that Oxley’s actual landing place was further west up the river than the obelisk—he had to prove the location of Oxley’s ‘sleeping place’ on the night of Monday, 27 September. In the Field Book entry for that day, Oxley says his party encountered a large tribe of Aborigines on the banks of present-day Toowong, and decided to pitch camp ‘about half-mile below this encampment on the same side of the river there being a small creek between us, which I hoped would prevent them visiting us’. This would put the camp at the present-day Patrick Lane, Toowong, near the Wesley Hospital. The next morning, in search of water, Oxley’s party ‘landed about three-quarters of a mile from our sleeping place’. This, according to Truman, would fix Oxley’s actual landing spot and discovery of the city site where the old Western Creek entered the river below Coronation Drive in Milton. The distance from Patrick Lane to the memorial at North Quay is, as the article notes, over ‘one and a half miles’. How could an experienced navigator like Oxley get his distance so wrong?
‘One assumes that the men who fixed the site for the memorial must have had additional data. I should very much like to know what that extra information was,’ crows a triumphant Truman.
In 1988 (and amidst another historic flush, this time the bicentennial of Australia, with a nod to the tourism influx expected for Expo), thirty-eight years after Truman made his revelations, and sixteen years after Steele repeated them in his book, The Explorers of the Moreton Bay District, a memorial to Oxley at the actual site in Milton was unveiled by the then Lord Mayor of Brisbane, Sallyanne Atkinson. It is situated inside the atrium of a pedestrian twin-towered business building called Oxley Centre, and consists of three posts bearing in glass and steel what look like the ragged remnants of a ship’s sail. Inscribed into the glass are extracts from the Field Books. At the base of the memorial is parked a busy coffee cart, attended each weekday morning by a queue of office workers.
At the point where the old Western Creek now emerges into the Brisbane River, there is the city’s only over-the-water restaurant, unambiguously called Oxley’s On the River. It serves Moreton Bay bugs, sand crab frittata and Oxley’s fish and chips.
To the right of the restaurant is a set of small concrete steps that lead down to the river’s edge a short distance from the creek outlet, now a concreted drain. On the steps is an old canned fruit tin for the cigarette butts of the restaurant’s chefs and waiting staff. Was this, the old Western Creek, the source of water Oxley first noted and which lured him to shore, to landing, looking for water, and to the beautiful chain of ponds watering a fine valley?
I contact Reverend Steele about the historical anomalies, the obelisk at North Quay, the apparent lack of care, or interest, in celebrating the city’s actual birthplace.
‘Many years ago someone associated with the John Oxley Library told me that the monument was an afterthought to use up funds allocated for the Centenary, and that its placement at North Quay was intended to be temporary pending a more precise identification of the site where Oxley had camped,’ he tells me in an e-mail. ‘Although it has long been acknowledged that North Quay is not the correct site, as far as I know no one in officialdom has taken the initiative to relocate it.’
Oxley made three trips to Brisbane in his lifetime. According to Steele, he never once set foot in the Brisbane ‘pocket’ or current site of the CBD. It was the first commandant at Moreton Bay—Lieutenant Henry Miller—who set up the settlement at the site fanning out from the obelisk. And Steele believes it was John Gray, the Pilot of Port Jackson, sent north from Sydney to oversee the permanent relocation of the settlement from its temporary beginnings in Redcliffe to North Quay, who decided upon the precise location. It was he, and Miller, who climbed the steep banks of the river below the obelisk.
This revelation unexpectedly upsets me, as might the discovery of a crucial anomaly in the family tree. The boy in me, the boy who admired John Oxley, the boy who revelled in his town’s convict history and drew tall-hatted commandants overseeing chain gangs in his exercise books, who always craned his neck to see the obelisk as the family’s mint-green HQ Holden station wagon heaved through North Quay, had been told a fib. The boy felt foolish.
Now, as a middle-aged man, I decide to go down to the Milton landing site and follow the line of the old creek in search of Oxley’s chain of ponds. As Truman writes: ‘I am told by old residents that there were chains of waterholes connected by the Western Creek which had its rise in a swamp with the picturesque name of Red Jacket Swamp which has since become Gregory Park next to the Milton State School. This creek used to flow through the areas now called Frew Park and Milton Park and came out at Dunmore Bridge, on Coronation Drive. The last part of it has been converted into a drain.’
I am quietly excited because the boy in me is discovering his city for the first time, tracing the steps of his hero Oxley, erasing the fib. With the infinite confidence of a child I am convinced I’ll be able to see beyond my time, beyond the office buildings and blocks of units and bitumen roads and computer stores and tanning salons, and at the very least feel the shape of the natural landscape that the Surveyor-General first stepped into. I can clearly imagine the landscape of my childhood in Brisbane, forty years earlier. And what I remember is not fantastically different from what I can see in the city today. The river hasn’t moved. The hills and gullies of the inner-west haven’t gone away. So why couldn’t I go back less than another 150 years, and see Oxley’s valley?
I begin at the old Western Creek outlet on the river, as Oxley did, and work in the reverse of Truman’s description. The drain which empties into the river, near the restaurant workers’ cigarette tin, runs beneath the Oxley Centre then a stretch of road and railway line before it emerges again, as a canal, running along the edge of Milton Park. (In historical ignorance, I have taken my young son to Milton Park dozens of times; there is a metal children’s train he enjoys clambering over. How could I have known this was Oxley’s turf, having been fibbed to?)
The grubby watercourse then takes a slight dogleg turn to the north and disappears beneath Milton Road and the dilapidated open field of Frew Park and the site of the former Milton Bowl bowling alley (where my mother played in a league for many years prior to its demolition) before vanishing beneath Gregory Park (and its cricket pitch and phantasmagoria of children’s swings where I have also taken my son too many times to remember). Gregory Park adjoins the Milton State School, where both my mother and grandfather were pupils. That grandfather and his wife, Freda, later lived in nearby Beck Street. So my maternal grandparents spent most of their life living a few hundred metres from the chain of ponds.
I was born in Brisbane, but left the city in my early twenties and remained away for two decades, returning to live in a house with my own family, also close to the ponds. In total, my life and family history have intersected with Brisbane’s birthplace for almost a century. I didn’t know it. I never knew the facts.
I walk the modern streets laid over Oxley’s landing place. I imagine the location of his campsite and the place where he jotted in his Field Book, possibly by the light of a fire, that here was a place ‘by no means an ineligible station for a first settlement up the river’. I continue on foot beyond Gregory Park to the sharp ridges of Paddington, in Brisbane’s inner-west, and look south toward the river and delineate, for the first time, the scoop of earth that was Oxley’s ‘fine valley’. Again, the book without an index. Then I go home, a few minutes’ walk away, to my house perched at the edge of a side gully of that valley. In a matter of hours, my view of home has been altered forever.
Late that night, with the house and suburb well asleep, I sit out in the cold on the back deck and peer down the forested gully in the direction of the river. It is quiet except for the occasional scratch and hiss of possums through the Chinese elms and gum trees. In September of 1824 Oxley must have heard this too; the devilish guttural screech of the possums; the strange scampering of bush turkeys through the undergrowth. He must have smelled the wood smoke from the Aboriginal camps, not as sharp as his own fire, but over distance strained with eucalypt.
I think about the obelisk. How there are two sites claiming ownership of Oxley’s landing. How almost two centuries have passed and nobody has bothered to clarify the record; to set things straight. I wonder why nobody cared enough to do that.
I recall how historical landmarks in this city have often been demolished on quiet nights just like this—the Bellevue Hotel, Cloudland—and yet they left the obelisk. Here John Oxley Landing to Look for Water Discovered the Site of this City. Here, an outpost for recalcitrant convicts. Here, a penal colony built to take the pressure off another, more powerful, more robust settlement. A secondary place. Something that germinated out of a government order, not from those human wellsprings of hope, endeavour, courage. A harsh, hot tableau of public servants in their woollen uniforms, their high boots designed for another climate, out to please southern masters. A town for the sharp talk of spivs and murderers; a violent place built on deception and aggression; and with them the entrepreneurs feeding off this government project. And at the top of Queen Street—not far from the present-day Executive Building and seat of state government—the huge wooden A-frame where early transgressors were publicly flogged. Government and citizen. Cruelty and fear. Fact and fiction.
I thought I knew my city. What else is there I don’t know? I then have a thought that brings the cold of the night into my stomach. I also knew absolutely nothing of my own family’s history in this place beyond two sets of grandparents. And even their stories were unclear, fuzzy at the edges with the omissions, diversions, false scents and often out and out obstructions offered by surviving family members over the decades. Did I share the same collective Brisbane mindset that couldn’t be bothered addressing the truth of the Oxley monument? Is this what we are like here?
I recall something the great Brisbane-born author David Malouf once wrote about this city in his essay ‘A First Place: The Mapping of a World’. He discusses the city’s topography: ‘walk two hundred metres in almost any direction outside the central city and you get a view—a new view. It is all gullies and sudden vistas.’ He then writes: ‘Wherever the eye turns here it learns restlessness, and variety and possibility, as the body learns effort. Brisbane is a city that tires the legs and demands a certain sort of breath. It is not a city, I would want to say, that provokes contemplation, in which the mind moves out and loses itself in space. What it might provoke is drama, and a kind of intellectual play, delights in new and shifting views, and this because each new vista as it presents itself here is so intensely colourful.’
I understand, shockingly, at that moment on the back deck, that I have lived with some form of historical amnesia. That I have not contemplated; that I am, in truth, disconnected from the place where I came into the world, when I always thought I knew it.
Here, on this night, I think of the obelisk over beside the expressway, the granite dark and gathering dew on its riverside, the words on the nameplate sporadically illuminated by vehicle brakelights where it faces the traffic, and wonder why my city of Brisbane grew up on a lie.