Andrew Goldie arrived in New Guinea early in 1876 on a contract to collect botanical specimens for the London nurseryman B.S. Williams. He also had separate arrangements with Ferdinand von Mueller, the Victoria Government Botanist, and E.P. Ramsay of the Australian Museum, to collect all kinds of specimens; botanical, ornithological, entomological, ichthyological and ethnological. In 1878 he established a trading store at Port Moresby to consolidate his business where he remained until poor health forced him to leave in 1890. Although very little has been published about Goldie, he is recognised as one of the most important collectors of New Guinea ethnological artefacts for Australia. The Museum of the Cumbraes, at Millport, Scotland, holds an unfinished, hand-written memoir by Goldie covering the period 1875-1879 that offers rare insights into Torres Strait and the southeast coast of New Guinea before they became parts of separate colonies. The memoir, extensively annotated, forms the centre piece of this monograph, contextualised by a biography, a detailed analysis of Goldie’s ethnological collecting, and an annotated and illustrated catalogue of the Goldie ethnological artefacts at Queensland Museum and the Museum of the Cumbraes.