“From down river where the mangroves grew thirty feet above the mud, from upstream beyond the second rapids where the cattle hills began, from near Black Scrub where the flying foxes camped in millions, from farms along a coast of golden bays and tumbled basalt where the breadfruit trees were spiders on the headlands. And from further out, Tara and Emu Creek and Nut Hill where the tribes had gathered under truce not so long ago when the trees were bearing to share, in suspended enmity, nature's gifts.”
(p. 4)
“The Germans came first [to the Royal], and never a minute before or after twelve. Descendants, most of them, of emigrants from the political troubles of the eighteen forties, they still spoke the dialects of homeland principalities, still taught them to their children, still worshiped in the bleak Lutheran chapels of their grandparents' youth. Yet they were fiercely Australian, too fiercely some, at a time when their ancestral homeland was at war and 'Hun' or 'Boche' worse than an insult. They suffered the hurt and nostalgia all immigrants feel who are torn between the traction of new life and old blood, of ancient ways and harsh beginnings. And the hurt was compounded when, early in the war and at Kitchener's call, some of the young men had volunteered and had been rejected because of their origins. During those years of war, many kept to themselves on their farms and avoided the towns as much as possible, except at Christmas and Easter. The drunken insult, though rare, happened.”
(p. 6)
“The Chinese waited until the German farmers had finished heir second glass of ale and had left to rejoin their families. The German women never appeared. he Germans ignored the Chinese and seldom patronised their shops. No meeting ground, no common empathy, existed between the two races. To the Germans, and to most older Australians, they were Chinamen or Chinee or Chinks or Chows and inferior. Even townspeople who did business with them and liked them, did not mix. Chinatown was a ghetto, physically and in most minds.”
(p. 7)
“To a Chinatown made more secretive by the smell of cooking and smouldering sandalwood in back rooms. The road to the coast through fields walled with stone by the kanakas [indentured Pacific Islander labourers]. The track that slipped down to the creek and the shack where Tom the old blackbirder lived [a person who kidnapped and trafficked Pacific Island labourers]. The Professor's tin and cardboard gunyah beyond the town's perimeter. And on the sullen scrubs upriver. And on again to the hills.
But the half-mile he walked from his first day at school had never lost its meaning. The road was a puzzle game he played with his grandmother. And the discoveries and inventions were his own, part of the hidden life, too secret to be shared, wrapped in brown paper inside his head and tied with string.”
(p. 29)
“But to Queenslanders Sydney, New South Wales, was almost another country. So far away and so divorced from the north, for most of the long span since the first convicts were sent up the Brisbane River, that to most people it was foreign. Sydney was a wicked city with strange goings on. To see once in a lifetime if you could afford the fare. On a honeymoon perhaps. And Melbourne was too far away to even think about and Adelaide and Perth in other countries. Life in those places and what happened there in the dim past, with no associations and few family links, meant little a thousand miles and more north, and less another thousand. And so the town, except for rare individuals, seldom gave January 26 a second thought.”
(p. 119)
