The Devil's Eye (25 page)

This book was researched and written with the help of a fellowship from the State Library of Queensland’s John Oxley Library.

The writing of the book was also made possible by a major grant from the Australia Council for the Arts, and also a grant from Arts Queensland. I’m also grateful for the continuing support of Varuna—The Writers House, in Katoomba, and a fellowship through Varuna to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig in Ireland.

Many people have contributed to this book, especially Linda Funnell, Jo Butler and Belinda Yuille from HarperCollins and editor Judith Lukin-Amundsen.

I’m grateful to the staff of the John Oxley Library, the State Library of Queensland, the Queensland State Archives, and the National Archives in Brisbane. Ewen McPhee from the Museum of Tropical Queensland and Jonathan Richards from Griffith University opened
their collections and helped with the initial research. I read Dr Richards’s remarkable thesis ‘A Question of Necessity: The Native Police in Queensland’.

I’m also grateful to Ken Campbell, a grandson of John Martin Kenny, and on the Porter side Garry Law in Auckland and Pennie Stoyles in Melbourne. Thanks also to the Outridge family, David and Geoff Murray, Peter R. Murray, John Shay and the Cooktown Historical Society, Rod McLeod and the North Queensland Maritime Museum, the Queensland Registry of Birth Deaths and Marriages, the Queensland Historical Society, Alan Gunders and Jonathan Nott from James Cook University, and Jeff Callaghan from the Bureau of Meteorology. Among the many other writers and researchers who informed this book are Anna Shnukal, Peter Gesner, Rob Dunwoodie, Anne Whiteford, Regina Ganter, Edwina Toohey (for the South Sea Islander song), Steve Mullins, Francis Tapim and Bruce Rigsby.

Percival Pitman Outridge’s booklet ‘The Pearling Disaster 1899: A Memorial’ provided the backbone for the research.

Some of the Aboriginal languages and people described in this book are taken from collections, reports and letters of Dr Walter Roth. The book has also been informed by many other sources, including John Haviland and Roger Hart’s book
Old Man Fog and the Last Aborigines of Barrow Point
as well as the histories and stories of the Guugu Mini, Guugu Warra, Guugu
Yalanji and Guugu Yimidhirr people. In the book I’ve described these tribes as they were described in 1899 and used the spellings from that era.

The terms used for the foreign labourers and the Aboriginal people are from the late nineteenth century. They reflect the attitudes of 1899.

And thanks to the people of Cooktown, Cape York and Torres Strait, and especially the traditional owners of the country around Princess Charlotte Bay, Bathurst Bay and Barrow Point.

Ian Townsend is a journalist with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He’s the winner of two national Eureka Prizes for science and medical journalism. His first novel,
Affection
, was longlisted for the 2007 Dublin IMPAC literary award, and shortlisted for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, the Foundation of Australian Literary Studies’ Colin Roderick Award for the best Australian book of 2005, and the 2005 Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. He lives in Brisbane with his wife, Kirsten MacGregor, and their three daughters: Charlotte, Josephine and Gabrielle.

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