Richard Parsons, a sawyer and convict of the colony of New South Wales (now Australia), was one of four free or ticket-of-leave men and the half proprietor of a boat who set off on a timber getting mission from Sydney bound for Illawarra in 1823.
The men were caught in a severe storm and driven north 728 km[1] seeing their boat smashed at the northern end of Moreton Island off the coast of Brisbane.
[2] Later in 1823, when the Surveyor General, John Oxley, was commissioned by Governor Brisbane to find sites for further penal settlements, he made a trip to the Moreton Bay area.
If it was not for a chance meeting with one of Parson's surviving partners, Thomas Pamphlett, and the men telling him of a large freshwater river they had stumbled across some months earlier, Oxley may never have made the exploration that lead to the establishment of Brisbane Town some years later.
His two companions began to travel with him but, upon reaching the Mooloolah River, Pamphlett decided to return to live with the Moreton Bay natives they had befriended earlier.