Category Archives: Corrections

Correction – Langsville Creek catchment area

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Just a quick note to mention that I have just updated the recent post about the catchments of the Crescent Reach to include a revised outline of the Langsville Creek catchment.

My first attempt at mapping that catchment omitted an area between (roughly) Ascog Terrace and Kensington Terrace, and including Toowong Village. I thought this might have been a separate catchment that discharged straight to the river, but closer inspection showed that it was actually a subcatchment of Langsville Creek. The give-away was the fact that one of the branches of Langsville Creek as depicted on the map from 1859 reached a good distance into this area.

So, Toowong Village is part of the Langsville Creek catchment after all (in fact I suspect it was built right on top of a watercourse), and the area of the catchment is about 3.3 km2 rather than the 2.7 km2 that I think I estimated the first time around.

I have also updated the kmz file that you can use in Google Earth to explore the catchments.

The pond is not the spring

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Today’s lesson: always go back to the source.

One of the intriguing leads that I came across when I started my research was a letter to the Department of Land and Works from J.C. Heussler, the first owner of Fernberg (Government House). Well, actually I didn’t come across the letter. Rather, I found a quotation of it in Allan Miles’ History of Rosalie1. Miles had found it in the State Archives, probably after many hours spent patiently perusing the correspondence files of various old departments. As Miles explained, the letter accompanied a petition from local land owners, residents and farmers, requesting the improvement of a road (what is now Caxton Street and Given Terrace) through the cemetery reserve (the swamp where Suncorp Stadium is today), and the formation of a water reserve “at the Red Jacket Swamp . . . where there is a spring of the purest water upon which the inhabitants (some hundreds, and daily increasing) have been entirely dependent during the late drought”.

The pond on the Fernberg grounds

The pond on the Fernberg grounds (Governor’s House), October 2011

Miles remarked that “some of the details referred to on the map are not legible”, which I took to mean that the location of the proposed water reserve probably was no longer visible. I always intended to check it out for myself, but life, and the rest of the website, moved on. Given that Heussler was the author of the letter, and the fact that even today there is a permanent pond where Western Creek once crossed the Fernberg grounds, I surmised that the spring in question might have been on the same property, perhaps even the very same pond. I even based a substantial part of my essay about John Oxley and the chain of ponds on this assumption.
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Notes:

  1. Allan Miles (1978), A History of Rosalie, Eastwood, NSW ↩