AustLit

Meston muses on aboriginal pre-contact history. He comments "Was the aboriginal here in the days of Egyptian, Assyrian, and Grecian civilisations, or was he here for thousands of years before those ancient civilisations ever came into existence?". He further notes that "They had no storied urns or animated busts, no marble temples, no Pantheons or Coliseums, no wondrous halls of Karnak, no Temples of Isis or Jupiter, no Pyramids [...], but they have outlived all the ancient architectural races, although their camps were mostly constructed with 'roof of air and walls of wind', and their dead bodies went back to their mother earth, and vanished in oblivion!" He follows with a detailed imaginative reconstruction of Moreton Bay tribes in their locations, with their different activities.