This is a story about survival, about three men's courage, about their tenacity, about
their resourcefulness, about their luck, but also about their association with the natives,
the aboriginals in the area.
They were stranded, shipwrecked, in one of the remote and unexplored coasts of Australia
in the early 1800s.
So their story begins in Sydney, when they go to take a 30-foot boat to Illawarra to
collect timber.
There were four ticket-of-leave convicts, Thomas Pamphlet, Richard Parsons, John Finnegan
and John Thompson, and they would leave Sydney in May of 1823.
The men leave Sydney, they're sailing to the Illawarra to cut timber, cedar.
They go to a place called Five Islands, which is a modern-day woollen gulf, and they almost
make it, but a storm comes up and blows them out to sea, and they've battled this storm
for five days, but it's not until the 11th day that it subsides enough for them to raise
a sail.
But they're in a serious way already.
Their water was depleted, it was gone on the second day.
But believing they'd been blowing south of Illawarra and south of Sydney, they set their
sails from northwest.
They don't have a compass or a chart, they have to sail by the sun and the stars.
And they do that for 10 more days.
It's the 21st day, the men have been at sea, and they see land for the first time.
It's this coast they see.
But as they approach, they can see the large waves breaking on the beach, and they know
bringing their vessel too close would be dangerous.
They also have another concern, they can see the natives, their fires along the beach as
well.
So they keep sailing north, not long after John Thompson will die, and they'll have
to bury him at sea.
It's day 24, and the men are desperate, the water and food are gone.
But good fortune shines upon them, they can see a stream flowing into the ocean.
So they decide to anchor off about a quarter of a mile, and Pamphlet would swim in with
a barrel and collect some water and bring it back to his colleagues.
But he spends an hour and a half in the surf.
And he's exhausted by the time he gets onto the beach, so he signals to his colleagues
to bring the boat in closer, and in doing so, they lose control of the vessel, and it
washes up on the beach and breaks up.
The men scurry around and recover the implements and tools they can, but one of the things
they recover the next day is a bag of flour.
And it's here on this very beach that trio spend their first night.
In the morning they track off to find civilisation, and it's not very long when they come across
their first encounter with the natives in this area, the Aboriginals, and they take
great pity on our trio, because they've nearly starved to death while they've been at sea.
They're in pretty poor condition.
So the Aboriginals give them fire, which allows them to bake that flour that was salvaged
off the boat into cakes.
They give them fish, and they help them keep warm.
But the trio are really determined to find civilisation.
So they head north, and they get to the end of the land.
They've come across a peninsula.
So they head down the western side, but it's on the fifth day they come across their first
obstacle.
The trio arrive on the beach in the distance, and they now realise they're actually on an
island.
The next morning they go down to check the beach, and to their surprise, there's a canoe.
They look up the beach, the Aboriginals are standing there next to another canoe, and
they realise it's actually been left there on purpose.
So Parsons and Finnegan paddle across here to Stradbroke Island, and they're greeted
very well by the natives.
The next day Finnegan goes back for Pamphlet, and they set back towards Stradbroke Island.
But they've made a bit of a mistake.
The tide is running at full strength, and they get dragged out to sea, and it takes
them five hours to paddle back, and when they make the beach, the Aboriginals are really
excited to see them.
They're jumping up and down and screaming and shouting, and Pamphlet and Finnegan and
Parsons think it's because they've made it back alive, but it's probably because they
returned their canoe.
This is Amity Point at Stradbroke Island, and this is where the trio are now staying
with the Aboriginals, and they've learnt that there's a canoe about 10 kilometres down
on the western side of the island, but they can use to get across to the mainland.
So they're tracked down there, it takes them a couple of days, but when they get there,
the canoe is pretty much buggered.
It's been left in the sun, and it's cracked and dried.
So they're tracked back up here to Amity Point, and it's where they'll stay with the Aboriginals
for about three weeks, and they'll learn to fish and hunt, but more importantly, they'll
build their own canoe, and they'll use that to canoe from Amity Point across to the mainland.
It takes them in 20 hours to paddle over from Stradbroke Island, but because of the mangroves
along the shoreline, they've decided to leave the canoe and continue overland.
When the trio make the mainland after crossing over from the islands, they track directly
north, because they think that's where civilisation might be, but it's not long before they find
a very wide river, this river here.
Now if pamphlets are the only one that can swim, finnigan and parson's can't, and this
is too wide for them to cross.
So what they decide to do is track west, upstream, to find a narrower crossing, and they do that
for a month, and it's on the other bank of this creek they arrive, which is their good
fortune on this bank is a canoe, so pamphlet being the only swimmer, swims across the creek
and commandeers a canoe, and they head back down river, and it's not very long before
they find another canoe, so it allows the trio to continue their journey back to the
mouth of the river.
When finnigan, pamphlet and parson's commandeer the second canoe, they're confronted by four
Aboriginal men who are actually not very impressed they're trying to steal their canoe, but when
the Aboriginal guys approached these Europeans, they realised what poor condition they were
in, and they took pity on them, and they went fishing purposely to feed these guys, and
they stayed with them for three days before they continued their journey down to the mouth
of the river.
There's little historical evidence on what happens to the men for when they leave the
mouth of the Brisbane River to when they get to Bribe Island, and reason for that is they've
been here for over four months, and they've probably been using track of time.
And the three men come across from the mainland to Bribe Island by canoe, now they're very
weak, but they spend four weeks here recovering with the Aboriginals, living with the Aboriginals,
but in one last ditch effort, they've decided to head north along this beach around the
island to civilisation.
They make Maloula Bar, it's about 30 kilometres north of here, and for some reasons we don't
understand, pamphlet returns to Bribe Island to live with the natives.
Finnigan and parson's they push on, and they make Nusa, which is about another 20-30 kilometres
north of Maloula Bar, but there's a serious falling out between the two men, and Finnigan
returns to Bribe Island to spend the rest of the time with pamphlet, and parson's he
goes keeps pushing on north.
It's late 1823, and on this very beach where we're standing, pamphlet and the Aboriginals
are cooking their catch of the day, when they're noticed out in the bay there was a cutter,
it's the mermaid with John Oxley, and he's exploring the coast looking for a new penal
colony.
Now, to describe the scene they saw, I've taken an extract out of Oxley's diary of
the day, 29th of November, 1823.
We rounded Point Skirmish about five o'clock, and we observed a number of natives rowing
along the beach towards the vessel, the foremost much lighter in colour than the rest.
We were last degree astonished when he came abreast of the vessel to hear him hail us
in good English.
After that day Finnigan returns from a hunting trip with the Aboriginals, and Finnigan and
Pamphlet tell Oxley about this river they've found south in this bay.
Oxley is very, very interested and wants to explore it, so the next day he sets out with
Finnigan as a guide, and they explore the river that Finnigan and Pamphlet tell him
about, and he names it the Brisbane River.
Now Parsons is several hundred kilometres north of here, but he's starting to see the
error of his judgement, it's getting increasingly warmer the further north he goes, so he also
returns to Bribery Island.
But in September of 1824 he's rescued ironically again by John Oxley, who's here exploring
the Morton Bay and the Brisbane River.
Parsons story is also published in Australia of the same year.
We're here in front of the Commissary Building in Brisbane, it's the oldest building in
Brisbane, built in 1829, as part of the Penal Colony.
The natural fact that's why Oxley was exploring Morton Bay, he was looking for a location
for a new Penal Colony where he needed found, Pamphlet and Finnigan and rescued them.
And it was Pamphlet and Finnigan who showed him the Brisbane River, a river he probably
wouldn't have found, because when Matthew Flinders was here in 1799, 24 years earlier,
he didn't find it either, it's because Brisbane River was well hidden from the bay.
The irony of the story is that Oxley, after being shown where this river is, puts in a
favourable report.
A favourable report that government then sets up the Penal Colony here, building behind
us, Pamphlet gets rescued, he goes back to Sydney, 18 months later, he steals two bags
of flour, found guilty, sentenced to seven years back at the new Morton Bay Penal Colony.
Pamphlet, the very man who found this river and showed Oxley where it was, comes back
to spend another seven years here.
This is a modern city of Brisbane, but as we're blank, it probably wouldn't be here
if it wasn't for the Morton Bay castaways surviving and being rescued.
