Brian Petrie was born in New South Wales and educated in Australia and in Canada and the United States at the University of Alberta and Michigan State University. He taught at the University of Western Ontario and at Concordia University in Montréal. His teaching speciality was in social class and structured inequality. Dr Petrie became interested in the fate of the French Canadian Patriotes when he visited the Archives of New South Wales during a sabbatical leave. He was shown documentation of the prisoners as they were landed after their voyage from Québec on HMS Buffalo and he soon realised that there was a wealth of information on these men. He was also surprised to find that the training track at Concord Oval in Sydney had once been the site of the Patriotes incarceration at Longbottom Stockade. These personal connections led to the long process of collecting information from several international and national archives and securing the translation of the diaries and journals.