HEIRS TO THE EMPIRE
What happens when your own family history leads you into the heart of Australia’s colonial story?
What began as a personal exploration of Peter Hobbs’ own ancestral connection to colonial Australia became a much deeper investigation into empire, power, faith, inherited systems, and the stories that continue to shape modern Australia.
Why This Book Exists
Heirs to the Empire was not written as an academic exercise.
It began with a personal question.
As Peter Hobbs explored his own family history—including ancestral links to Australia’s early colonial story—he found himself confronting much bigger questions about empire, settlement, faith, power, and inherited systems of influence.
What started as genealogy became investigation.
What began as curiosity became confrontation.
And what emerged was a deeply personal exploration of history, culture, institutional power, and Australian identity.
Peter’s Connection to the Story
Peter Hobbs has a deep personal connection to Australian colonial history, particularly through his own family’s links to early settlement and the Bellarine Peninsula.
As a storyteller, communicator, and researcher, his journey into history became more than simply uncovering names and dates.
It became a search for meaning.
How does inherited history shape who we become?
What systems continue long after the empire itself has faded?
And what truths remain buried beneath the official narrative?
ABOUT THE BOOK
Some systems don’t disappear. They simply change their clothes.
Heirs to the Empire began with one man tracing his own family story through Australia’s colonial past.
What Peter Hobbs found was more than names on a family tree.
He found patterns. Patterns of power. Influence disguised as virtue.
Inherited narratives that shaped generations.
Structures that outlived the empire itself.
Blending personal history, theology, cultural critique, and historical exploration, Heirs to the Empire asks unsettling questions about authority, identity, belief, and the systems that quietly shape the world we inherit.
Some readers will see history differently after this book. Others may begin asking questions they were never encouraged to ask.
Some stories must be physically explored.
Heirs to the Empire began with Peter Hobbs’ own ancestral connection to Australia’s colonial story.
But history does not live only in books.
It lives in landscapes.
Through SquattAus, Peter explores the coastlines, forgotten settlements, hidden locations, and physical places that shaped Australia’s colonial inheritance.
This is where history becomes tangible.
Where research meets lived experience.
Where the story continues.
Explore The Story