Dalaipi

Tom Petrie's Reminiscences of Early Queensland, compiled by his daughter in 1904, provides the most detailed of all surviving accounts of Aboriginal life in the Moreton Bay region. Petrie established his homestead, Murrumba (meaning 'good' in the local dialect), near the North Pine River in territory held by the Aboriginal community which he called the North Pine tribe.

In the 1840s and 1850s, Dalaipi was an elder and rain maker of this clan of the Turrbal people. According to Petrie, Dalaipi "was good and very reverent looking and carried himself with an air as though he were some one of importance, as, indeed he was, for his word was law among the tribe, and he was looked up to by every one".

It was Dalaipi, then nearly sixty years of age, who encouraged Petrie, who was searching for good grazing land, to establish his cattle run in the North Pine area in 1859. Dalaipi's son, Dal-ngang, accompanied Petrie on his first trip to select the land. It has been suggested that, by giving his land to a person he could trust, Dalaipi was in fact protecting his most valuable possession from unsympathetic landholders.

Petrie thereafter continued to enjoy the protection of Aboriginal people and never experienced the stock losses and other problems which plagued other landowners whose relationships with local indigenous people were less satisfactory.

To commemorate the memory of Dalaipi and his North Pine clan, which has since become known as the Dalaipi clan, the Dalaipi rainforest nature trail was established near the site of Tom Petrie's Murrumba homestead on land now part of Our Lady of the Way School at Petrie. A Dalaipi Aboriginal Cultural Festival was held as part of the Pine Rivers Heritage Festival on 6 June 1998.