Wrong Side

“The handful of historical chroniclers of 1820’s ‘Moreton Bay’ – of which I am one – remain painfully aware that the paltry handfuls of documents at their disposal from this era represent not so much a window onto the past as, more that likely, a wilful distortion of it. For these are all Occupier Documents: What they have to say about the First Nation true owners are invariably misreadings, composed either out of cultural ignorance or purposeful slander. The real windows into this past are actually the yawning gaps in the fabric of our understanding through which the finely tuned, reconstructive imagination is bold enough to pass. We can observe all that compellingly displayed in this evocative volume, Wrong Side. For here the past is humanised rather than sanitised. It is layered and subtle rather than flatly or insipidly one-dimensional. The experience of reading this book represents a whole world renewed, rather than yet another tired recycling of the dry residue of dubious documentary fragments.”

– Raymond Evans,
Historian and Poet