On Saturday morning I was sitting alone on the shoreline at Urangan at the entrance to the vast Hervey Bay in Queensland. On that very morning 150 years ago, a migrant ship, the David McIver, entered Hervey Bay carrying 404 immigrants, there having been only one death but also nine births on the 107 day voyage from Liverpool. Included in the passenger list were Annie Brennan, my great great grandmother, a young widow of 40 years with her five children, one of whom Martin was to become my great grandfather.
Hervey Bay is an expansive but shallow bay sheltered from the Pacific Ocean by the majestic Fraser Island. On 6 July 1863, the David McIver spent the day searching for a channel until it was anchored in four fathoms of water. Some of the crew got into a small boat and made for the shore at Urangan close to where I was sitting 150 years later. They came ashore and found two Aborigines. I presume they were males. Those two Aboriginal men without protest accompanied the crew in the boat and showed them the way to Captain Jeffrey's Admiralty Survey Camp.
The David McIver was only the second migrant ship ever to come into Hervey Bay and here were two Aborigines happy to extend a helping hand to complete strangers who must have looked very strange indeed. One Aboriginal was then commissioned to send word to Maryborough 40km away. That Aboriginal walked and ran all through the night to bring word of these new arrivals. A pilot was then dispatched. Within two days, a steamer named Queensland arrived, towed the David McIver to White Cliff on Fraser Island, and then received the disembarking passengers to transport them up the Mary River to the port of Maryborough where they arrived on 9 July 1863.
These Aborigines who helped my ancestors and their fellow passengers carried neither purse nor bag nor sandals. They extended the hand of peace and welcomed the stranger. Many on the David McIver were eligible for land grants from the newly established Queensland Government.
That was the lure for their coming to the other side of the world rather than the United States. Who'd have ever thought that one of Annie Brennan's great grandchildren, my father, would have been one of the judges who just 21 years ago in the Mabo case said that Aborigines had always owned the land which had