Monthly Archives: May 2014

Uncovering Langsville Creek, Part 4 – Something to do with death

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This is the fourth in a series of posts about Langsville Creek, which was Western Creek’s upstream neighbour on the Toowong/Milton Reach. Before reading this post, you may like to look at Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of the series.

Previously, on Uncovering Langsville Creek . . .

The first three episodes of this little mini-series have unfolded much like a daytime soap: the plot has thickened, but not much has happened. Well, without giving too much away, this is the episode where things happen. It is the murder-mystery end-of-season thriller. Characters will die, secrets will be revealed, and lost worlds discovered. But first, a brief recap.

The previous episode introduced the map that you see below, which dates from 1929 and is the only one I have found that shows the upper reaches of Langsville Creek. We explored the stream that runs from the upper-left corner of the map into what is labelled as Anzac Park. Today, the area at the top-left is the Treetops on Birdwood estate, and the area labelled as Anzac Park is the Mount Coot-tha Botanic Gardens (hover your cursor over the image to see the modern landscape). In the slopes below Birdwood Terrace we found the headwaters of Langsville Creek more or less as they have always been — as gullies running through dry scrub. Immediately across the road, however, we found lush rainforest streams flowing into large lagoons, all part of the regulated water cycle of the botanic gardens.

Part of a map of Brisbane dating from 1929 (available online via Brisbane Images). The watercourses shown are the upper reaches of Langsville Creek. (Note that some distortions and artifacts emerged in preparing the map for Google Earth, most notably the giant crack running along Mount Coot-tha Road.)

At the end of the Western Freeway, where the entrance to the Legacy Way tunnel is still being built, the trail ran cold, and the Gardens stream came to an end. It is time, then, to move onto the other two streams — or one of them anyway, as I intend to drag this series out to a fifth installment (check back for it in six months or so). The stream we will look at today flows right through another of Toowong’s famous landmarks: the cemetery. Continue reading →

New site map

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When I created this site, my vision was of a neat history of the Western Creek catchment. Each part of the catchment would have a page devoted to it, and each page would fit snugly within the structure of the site. But as the site has progressed I have ended up writing about a wider range of topics and locations than I anticipated. The story of Western Creek has become just one chapter within a broader story about the Milton and Toowong reaches of the Brisbane River, which in turn is part of an even broader story about suburban development in Brisbane.

Consequently, much of what I have written does not fit within the site’s page structure, and resides instead within the blog-style posts of the Newsroom. You may have noticed the tag-cloud in the newsroom that attempts to index the assortment of topics and locations discussed on the site, but if you’ve gotten much value out of it, I’ll be surprised. This site’s content is principally about locations, so it really needs a location-based index — otherwise known as a map.

So here it is: the new site map for oncewasacreek.org. You can also access it via the site’s main menu.

Each marker on the map indicates a location that I have written about somewhere on the site. If you click on a marker, you will get a list of the pages and posts that discuss it. This is the most logical and efficient way I have come up with to index the site’s contents, though it does depend on my vigilance in identifying all of the relevant pages for each location. It is entirely possible that I have missed some, in which case you can feel free to suggest some additions.

Also, if you are watching very carefully, you may notice that the Forum is no longer in the site menu. I have decided to retire the Forum, since barely anyone ever used it.