Landtakers: The Story of an Epoch

Guilty curiosity frustrated a determination to steer clear of Pat Dennis's. His business with the agent, the Land Commissioner, and the storekeeper finished and the dray once more on the west road, he was congratulating himself on an incognito successfully preserved from the omnipresent spies of McGovern and Flanagan when a desire to know what these two old enemies were up to (they must have been plotting to destroy him for the last four years) became irresistible. He sent Peters and Herb on with the dray and rode back to the settlement.

Settlement was rapidly becoming inadequate to describe broad, well- made streets, two-storeyed hostelries, houses built of dressed timber and painted, shops that sold perfumes, pomades, stays and wedding-rings in a mysterious annex from the saddlery, horse medicine and barrelled rum department. A boat arrived fortnightly from Sydney with news of the great world, and there was a Moreton Bay Courier to mirror the affairs of the little world held in the claws of two bends of the river, but busy with the comings and goings of a vast hinterland.