This was Turrbal country long before it was anyone's estate. For thousands of years, families camped along this stretch of the river - which they knew as Maiwar - and at the mouth of the creek, fishing its tidal flats and gathering at the water's edge. Brisbane itself was Meanjin, said to mean the place of the blue water lilies. The dispossession was not abstract: in 1858, two Aboriginal men from the Breakfast Creek area, Dalinkua and Dalpie, were moved to write to the local newspaper protesting the treatment of their people. Newstead House rose in the middle of all this in 1846, built for the Scottish pastoralist Patrick Leslie by Andrew Petrie, the colony's first builder and architect. It began as a modest cottage in the plain Colonial-Georgian style - nothing like the late-Victorian showpiece it would become.

Leslie barely settled in. By 1847 he had sold the place to his brother-in-law, Captain John Clements Wickham - a man with a remarkable past, for he had sailed as first lieutenant aboard HMS Beagle on the voyage that carried Charles Darwin around the world. As Brisbane's police magistrate, Wickham expanded the cottage into something grander, adding the wide verandahs and French doors built for entertaining in the subtropical heat. After him, the house passed through a long line of tenants and owners - leased to an attorney-general, then to the merchant and politician George Harris, who lived here with his wife Jane for twenty-seven years. For a few years in the 1890s it was home to the businessman Lewis Flegeltaub and his large family. Each occupant left a mark, and the house grew layer by layer into the elegant residence visitors tour today.

In March 1898, Newstead House came within a whisker of erasure. The Lysaght brothers bought the property meaning to knock the house flat and raise a factory in its place - a works churning out iron and rabbit-proof fencing wire for the surrounding farms. Then the agricultural economy slumped, the factory plans collapsed, and the wrecking never came. The reprieve was permanent. Eventually the property was vested in a public trust, and the building that had outlasted every other survivor of early Brisbane was secured for good. It was listed on the Queensland Heritage Register in 1992, by which time its rarity was beyond dispute.

During the Second World War, the house took on a new role. With Brisbane transformed into a forward base for the Allied campaign in the Pacific, American servicemen occupied Newstead House, and the old colonial rooms filled with foreign accents and wartime urgency. That chapter is remembered in the grounds by the Australian-American War Memorial, dedicated on 3 May 1952 by the Queensland Governor, Sir John Lavarack, in tribute to the US servicemen and women who helped defend Australia. Today the house is a museum, painted and furnished in the rich late-Victorian style of its heyday, open to visitors and hosting concerts on its lawns. Below the windows, the river still bends past, doing exactly what it did when this was the only house on the hill.