Toowong Cemetery

About this audio guide

This guide to Toowong Cemetery in Brisbane follows Walter Thomas Porriott, a nineteenth-century swindler who posed as a doctor, a sea captain, and a dozen other identities. It traces him from Whitechapel, London, in the autumn of eighteen eighty-eight, to a Brisbane hillside grave carrying his devoted wife Bessie's name but not his own. You'll hear what a descendant, generations later, came to suspect about those final months in London. Best heard standing at the grave itself, on the rise above the city.