Ormiston House grew in stages between about 1858 and 1865, named for a Hope family place back in Scotland. Hope had reached New South Wales in 1843 and thrown himself into the economic life of the young Moreton Bay region, accumulating land across what would become Queensland - a share in Kilcoy Station, Shafston House at Kangaroo Point, and these acres above Raby Bay. He began with cotton, then turned to sugar cane, and as the plantation prospered he raised a substantial brick residence in 1864-65. It was, for its time and place, astonishingly modern: gas lighting (very likely a by-product of the sugar-making next door), hot water, and indoor cisterns, in a corner of the colony where most settlers still drew water from a well. Bricks were fired on the property; timber was felled and milled on site.

The mill was the heart of it. In 1864 Hope erected Queensland's first sugar-crushing mill on the bank of Hilliards Creek, the machinery shipped out from Cook and Company of Glasgow, and that September it produced the colony's first commercially milled sugar. Within a year the Ormiston plantation was the largest in Queensland. By the late 1860s the mill and an attached distillery were running hard, Hope buying cane from smaller neighbouring growers and crushing it on shares as a central mill. What happened on this shore rippled outward: sugar would become one of Queensland's defining industries, transforming whole stretches of the tropical coast. It all traces back to a creek mouth at Ormiston and a single season's crop in 1864.

From September 1867, the cane at Ormiston was harvested by South Sea Islander workers - men brought from the islands of Melanesia, in the western Pacific, who lived in separate quarters on the estate. They were part of a vast and brutal traffic: across roughly four decades, some 62,000 Islanders were carried to Queensland and New South Wales to labour on the sugar plantations. Many were recruited through deception or outright kidnapping, a practice known by the ugly, accurate name of blackbirding. The wider context is not incidental to Hope: he came from a family whose fortune had roots in West Indian slavery. These Islander labourers were not a footnote to the Queensland sugar story - they were its foundation, real people far from home whose work the industry depended on and whose descendants, the Australian South Sea Islander community, carry that history still.

Hope's sugar empire did not last. A bitter lawsuit with a neighbour ended with the mill machinery sold off, and Hope leased out much of the land before sailing for England with his family in 1882. He died in 1894, and the house passed from the family in 1912 to the grazier John Arthur Macartney. In 1959 the Carmelite Nuns acquired the property and built a monastery in its grounds; with their blessing, Ormiston House today is a house museum, lovingly maintained by a restoration association formed in the 1960s. Visitors walk its high-ceilinged rooms, admire the cedar joinery and pressed-metal ceilings, and stand on verandahs that look across Raby Bay much as they did in Hope's day. An avenue of bunya pines still marks the grounds. The 1935 cairn still honours the sugar pioneer - and a fuller telling now insists on honouring, too, the Islander hands that made his sugar.