Her name was an Aboriginal word for lightning, and in 1884 she was the pride of a colony arming itself against shadows. With Britain's military presence in Australia thinning and rumours of Russian warships prowling the Pacific, Queensland founded its own Maritime Defence Force and ordered two gunboats from Armstrong, Mitchell & Co. on the River Tyne. Gayundah was a flat-iron gunboat, low and stubborn, 120 feet of iron displacing 360 tons, built to carry a single heavy gun close inshore. Launched at Newcastle upon Tyne on 13 May 1884, she steamed out for the far side of the world that November, threaded the Suez Canal, and reached Brisbane on 27 March 1885. A colony of fewer than a million people had bought itself a warship for 35,000 pounds.

For all the theatre of the Wright affair, Gayundah's real claim sits in the quieter history of technology. On 9 April 1903 she transmitted the first wireless message received from a ship at sea by an Australian shore station. Her aerial was improvised genius: a tall bamboo pole lashed to the mast. The message that crackled into Brisbane was gloriously ordinary, a watch officer's shrug about the weather. "Gun drill continued this afternoon and was fairly successful," it began, "blowing squally and raining." It closed, simply, "Good night." Two decades before radio reached most Australian homes, a few mundane words travelled invisibly over Moreton Bay, and the modern world arrived in Queensland aboard an obsolete gunboat.

Gayundah outlived her usefulness slowly. The 1888 standoff had ended without a shot, the police commissioner D.T. Seymour himself leading the boarding party that talked Wright down and walked him ashore, and the gunboat settled into a long, undramatic career. She trained sailors, patrolled Moreton Bay during the First World War, and in 1911 sailed all the way to Broome to police Australia's northern fishing grounds, seizing two Dutch schooners caught poaching sea cucumber and trochus shell. Paid off in 1918, she suffered the indignity reserved for old ships that refuse to sink: she went to work. Sold to Brisbane Gravel, she hauled sand and gravel up and down the Brisbane River for three more decades, a gun platform turned barge. She even sank once, at her moorings in 1930, and was simply raised and put back to work. By the 1950s even that was finished. Stripped of everything valuable, her hull was sold to the Redcliffe council for a final, humble job.

On 2 June 1958 they ran her aground beneath the cliffs at Woody Point to break the waves, and there she has stayed, dying by inches in the salt air. Walk the foreshore at low tide and you can pick your way out toward her: a corroded ribcage of plates and rivets, streaked orange, the bay washing through gaps where steel has simply dissolved. The deterioration never stops. In recent years the top of her bow has fallen away entirely. Her old six-inch gun survives in dignity at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, but the ship herself is returning to the elements that carried her here, a piece of nineteenth-century iron quietly becoming part of the Queensland shoreline.