After a major campaign in The Queenslander in 1880 and the publication of a pamphlet titled The Way We Civilise: Black and White: The Native Police, he suffered personal and political fallout, and had to move to Melbourne for some time.

Following the early death of both parents, Feilberg was placed in foster care with Danish relatives, his aunt Louise Stegman (née Brummer) and her husband greengrocer Conrad Stegmann, at the time living in Edinburgh, Scotland.

[a] Suffering from a serious case of tuberculosis, Feilberg was advised to migrate to Australia where time spent in the dry interior might mitigate some of the symptoms and provide a chance for survival.

[4] He arrived in Sydney from London on the Aberdeen vessel Sir John Lawrence on 18 June 1867, travelling onto Rockhampton carrying a letter of introduction to Archibald Berdmore Buchanan, a Scottish squatter.

[5] The knowledge he gained in the outback, including his experiences with the Native Police and the darker sides of the colony's frontier policies, would later influence his work as a journalist, political commentator, and author.

[6] After being naturalised at Rockhampton Court House on 21 June 1870, Feilberg chose to settle in Maryborough, where in August 1870 he commenced a career in journalism, initially assisting Ebenezer Thorne on his newly launched three-weekly Wide Bay and Burnett News.

[b][citation needed] After leaving Maryborough, he was employed by the Brisbane Courier as a political commentator, leader writer, and as editor of The Queenslander, from January 1879 to December 1880.

[12] In the nine months from during March to December 1880 Feilberg utilised The Queenslander as a platform to launch a series of powerfully-worded editorials and articles demanding a Royal Commission and a change of policy with regard to Indigenous Australians.

[citation needed] A change in the proprietorship of the Brisbane Newspaper Company in late December 1880 caused Feilberg to endure a year of being gradually relegated to steadily more subordinate positions on the journal.

On 23 September 1882, in a private letter in reply to Sir Arthur Gordon, the former Governor and High Commissioner of the Western Pacific, Feilberg wrote: "I despair of doing much good for the blacks, and I have incurred enough personal ill-will myself by writing on their behalf during my residence in Queensland".

[13][14] The personal and political fallout following the campaign of The Queenslander in 1880 subsequently caused Feilberg to accept a position as sub-editor on the then leading Victorian journal The Argus, based in Melbourne, in June 1882.

[15] It was noted in the contemporary press that Feilberg "has had very definite political opinions, and, in labouring unremittingly to impress them upon the public mind, has suffered at various times from the misrepresentation and obloquy which every active politician is fated to encounter".

The issue of the so-called Kanaka trade or blackbirding – the use of Melanesian labour on Queensland sugar plantations – was high on his agenda from the late 1870 onwards; he and his journal were instrumental in bringing about the conviction of the captain of the recruiting schooner Jason in 1871.

In the nine months from during March to December 1880 Feilberg utilised its weekly, The Queenslander, as a platform to launch a series of powerfully-worded editorials and articles demanding a Royal Commission and a change of policy.

[citation needed] Feilberg outlined some of his deeper feelings in an editorial printed in the Queenslander on 19 January 1878, saying amongst other things that the "...complacent blindness which induces the natives of Europe to regard their own customs and institutions as excellent above compare, and their adoption as a certain remedy and advantageous substitute for all other manners of living, even to the most simple and Arcadian, has served as excuse for enormities at the contemplation of which humanity revolts...".

The least show of resistance is answered by a rifle bullet; in fact, the first introduction between blacks and whites is often marked by the unprovoked murder of some of the former – in order to make a commencement of the work of "civilising" them.

[24] Other chairmen over time were noted Queenslanders such as jurist Sir Samuel Griffith, politician John Douglas, poet James Brunton Stephens, and journalist William Senior the principal shorthand writer also known as "Red Spinner".

[c] His funeral at Brisbane's Toowong Cemetery was attended by a wide range of friends, journalists and several high-ranking politicians from both sides of Queensland politics, including the former Premier, Sir Thomas McIlwraith.

[citation needed] Feilberg's 1880 pamphlet, The Way We Civilise, played a crucial behind the scene role in the British Government move to nullify Queensland's unilateral annexation of New Guinea in April 1883.

It was actively used by Sir Arthur Gordon, the Aborigines Protection Society, and others, as evidence to persuade the British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone and his Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Derby, that Queensland was utterly unfit for the task of ruling New Guinea.

Feilberg's pamphlet is equally cited in the highly profiled Bringing Them Home (1997), which reported on the Stolen Generations (Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families to be brought up in institutions during the twentieth century), and in Ben Kiernan's Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination (2008).

[40] In his spare time Feilberg wrote fiction and several sketches, romantic short stories, and also a small adventure novel, A Strange Exploring Trip, which some contemporaries viewed as having a curious resemblance with Henry Rider Haggard's later King Solomon's Mines (from 1885).