Note on the Text

This edition carries the complete text of the printed book of 2012. It was not set from a manuscript: unlike the later book, Bundaberg's Beginnings survives only as the print-ready PDF, so the text had to be recovered from the typeset page. What that involved is set out below, because it bears on how much to trust what you are reading.

How the text was recovered

A PDF stores lettering, not sentences. It records which glyph sits where, and nothing about paragraphs, headings or reading order. Three things had to be reconstructed:

Reading order. The book is set in two columns, and a PDF keeps glyphs in the order the typesetter placed them rather than the order you read them. The blocks of type on each page are found with MuPDF and read a band at a time: a block running the full measure — a heading, a wide plate — closes the band above it and opens the one below, and within a band the left column comes before the right. The pages the book sets in a single measure are listed, since telling those apart by rule kept going wrong on the pages the rule was not written for.
The lettering comes from Poppler rather than from MuPDF, because this book sets Th as a single glyph which MuPDF maps to T alone — every The would arrive as Te. Each is asked only for what it reads well: the structure from one, the characters from the other.
Structure. Nothing marks a heading as a heading, but the book's own typography does: the body is set at one size, captions at another, the index at a third. Each role was identified from the size histogram of the whole book. Quoted matter is set in italic throughout, which is how the sixteen thousand words the book quotes are told from the words it writes.
Paragraphs. Rebuilt from the signs a compositor leaves — a first line is indented, a last line stops short of the measure, and a block of type ends a paragraph unless its sentence is still running.

The chapter titles were not recovered this way. The book sets them in letterspaced capitals, which the PDF records with real spaces inside the words, so that EARLY comes back as EAR LY. They were transcribed by hand from the contents page instead, and are given here in sentence case.

The result is 91,432 words across 28 chapters, besides the front matter, the chart of descendants and the closing notes. It has been checked against the PDF at many points, but recovery of this kind is never perfect: if you find a passage that reads wrongly, the PDF is the authority, and every page here links to its page in it. Please report anything you find, and it will be listed below.

How this edition differs in form

The index has been rebuilt. The printed index gave page numbers; those same entries now link to the passage itself. Each printed page keeps an anchor in the text, which is what the links point at.
Chapter titles are set in sentence case rather than the printed capitals, which read poorly on screen and which some screen readers spell out letter by letter.
Plates are reproduced from the PDF and link to the page they appear on. Where the book prints a caption beneath a plate it is carried over and used as the picture's description. Where it does not, the book's own lists of its maps, tables and photographs are consulted: those give a page for each illustration, and their entries are matched to the plates on that page. Names taken from the lists are set in capitals in the book and are given here in ordinary case. A plate named in neither place is left without a description rather than given an invented one; most of those are the documents reproduced in the appendices.
The chart of descendants that opens Part 6 is a table, not prose, and is read straight off the page: the left edges of its boxes give the columns, and Walter's children head them. It is redrawn with its brackets, as nested lists, so that the descent it shows is available to a screen reader and the chart folds into a single column on a narrow screen instead of running off the side. Everyone on it is there.
The appendices, which the book prints inside the chapters they belong to, stay where they are.
The book's six parts have title pages carrying nothing but display type. Rather than reproduce them as near-empty pages, each part groups its chapters on the contents page and is named above each chapter's own title.
The dedication, acknowledgements, foreword and both prefaces are here, as are the closing notes. The printed contents, the lists of appendices, maps, tables and photographs, and the index are not reproduced: the first are navigation this edition provides for itself, and the index is rebuilt.

Departures from the printed text

Added since 2020 Throughout

This edition Twenty plates stand a few paragraphs lower than the printed book stands them.

A printed page cannot reflow, so a plate goes where the page has room for it, which is often a little before its subject is reached: the portrait of Richard Walter Adams stands above the paragraph about his marriage rather than beside it. Where a plate's caption names something a paragraph within the next few says too, the plate is moved down to it. It is only ever moved down, never more than six paragraphs, and never out of the piece it is in; a plate the book already places after its subject is left alone. Nothing else about the plates is changed, and every one still links to its page of the PDF.

Correction Throughout

The printed book (NOTE: Laudanum - A socially acceptable opiate ...), *(NOTE: tithe - Literally one-tenth ...), (This was long before the introduction of superphosphates ... - R. L. C.)

This edition [NOTE: Laudanum - A socially acceptable opiate ...], [NOTE: tithe - Literally one-tenth ...], [This was long before the introduction of superphosphates ... - R. L. C.]

The authors comment on their own history in 38 places, glossing a word, filling in a background, or correcting a source. The book marks them three ways -- an asterisk before the bracket, the word NOTE inside it, or the initials of whichever brother wrote it -- and none of the three is a mark a reader notices, so they read as part of the history. Here they are in square brackets, which the book uses nowhere else, and set a size smaller. Five that are a whole paragraph are set apart from the text around them instead. Nothing in them is altered.

Correction Part 6, the chart of descendants

The printed book Mary Ann Adams's marriage is given on the chart as “m: 29 Jan”, without a year.

This edition m: 29 Jan 1876

The year is supplied from the book's own text: chapter 23 has “In 1876 she married John Henry Edma Bertheau”.

Printed book inconsistent Chapter 19

The printed book Chapter 17 (at the chapter head), Chapter 19 (in the Contents)

This edition Chapter 19

The chapter head repeats the number of chapter 17. The Contents, and the sequence either side of it, both make this chapter 19.

Correction Chapter 1, under “The Nature of Sugar Cane”

The printed book the residual side and green top leaves removed, ether with the knife or by the prior burning-off of the cane plot

This edition … removed, either with the knife …

A slip in the printed book.

If you find an error in the book or in this edition — the conversion to an online format may have introduced its own — please write to Frances Connor at collectedbooksinquiries@gmail.com. Corrections will be listed on this page rather than made silently.