Page:Tom Petrie's reminiscences of early Queensland.djvu/26

2 and was chosen to fill the position of superintendent or engineer of works in Brisbane. The Commandant in the latter place had been driven to petition for the services of a competent official, as there seemed no end to the blunders and mistakes always being made. The family came as far as Dunwich in the James Watt, then finished the journey in the pilot boat, manned by convicts, and landed at the King's Jetty—the present Queen's Wharf—the only landing place then existing.

Although my father cannot look back to this day of arrival, he remembers Brisbane town as a city of about ten buildings. Roughly speaking it was like this : At the present Trouton's corner stood a building used as the first Post Office, and joined to it was the watchhouse; then further down the prisoners' barracks extended from above Chapman's to the corner (Grimes & Petty). Where the Treasury stands stood the soldiers' barracks, and the Government hospitals and doctors' quarters took up the land the Supreme Court now occupies. The Commandant's house stood where the new Lands Office is being built (his garden extending along the river bank), and not far away was the Chaplain's quarters. The Commissariat Stores were afterwards called the Colonial Stores, and the block of land from the Longreach Hotel to Gray's corner was occupied by the "lumber yard" (where the prisoners made their own clothes, etc.). The windmill was what is now the Observatory, and, lastly, a place formerly used as a female factory was the building Mr. Andrew Petrie lived in for several months till his own house was built. The factory stood on the ground now occupied by the Post Office, and later on the Petrie's house was built at the present corner of Wharf and Queen Streets, going towards the Bight (hence the name Petrie's Bight). Their garden stretched all along the river bank where Thomas Brown and Sons' warehouse now stands, being bounded at the far end by the salt-water creek which ran up Creek Street.

Kangaroo Point, New Farm, South Brisbane, and a lot of North Brisbane were then under cultivation, but the rest was all bush, which at that time swarmed with aborigines. So thick was the bush round Petrie's Bight that one of the workmen (a prisoner) engaged in building the house there