John Oxley Centre Fail

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A plaque in the old courtyard of the John Oxley Centre, comemmorating Oxley's landing at Western Creek.

A plaque in the old courtyard of the John Oxley Centre, comemmorating Oxley’s landing at Western Creek.

Back in April 2012 I posted about the renovations of the big courtyard in between the two office towers of the John Oxley Centre on Coronation Drive. This courtyard sits more or less on top of the old stream of Western Creek (now Milton Drain) just before it met the river. It is quite likely where John Oxley came ashore in 1824 to look for fresh water, which he found in abundance somewhere along Western Creek.

In the gardens of the old courtyard there were plaques engraved with excerpts of John Oxley’s diary describing his landing here in 1824. I wondered if these might somehow survive the renovations, or if some other homage to Oxley’s landing might replace them.

The two 'signposts' at the entrance to the newly renovated John Oxley Centre.

The two ‘signposts’ at the entrance to the newly renovated John Oxley Centre.

Last weekend I finally got around to seeing how it has all turned out. The whole space has been given a facelift to give it a more ‘modern’ look and feel. (To my mind it was hardly worth it, but hey, that’s not my call to make.) The plaques are gone, but Oxley’s landing has not been forgotten. Unfortunately though, the effort to commemorate it could hardly be described as successful.

As you approach the courtyard from Coronation Drive, you might notice these two oddly shaped steel plates affixed to two intricately marked square poles. Or more accurately, there are four plates, each fixed to opposite sides of the poles to give the impression of two distinct shapes. What are they meant to be? Flags? Signposts? There is black trimming running around the outline of the plates, and also diagonally across them. On one of the plates, half of the diagonal line already appears to have fallen off, leaving a smear of glue. Is this supposed to be the outline of the river? The creek, perhaps?

Now, if you stand beneath the plates (they are about two and a half metres above the ground) and look closely, and if the light strikes them at just the right angle, you might just be able to see that there are letters embossed on them:

The two ... erm, 'pages' on the posts outside the John Oxley Centre.

The two … erm, ‘pages’ on the posts outside the John Oxley Centre.

Aha! This must be it! Sure enough, at the top of the two ‘skinny’ plates are the words “TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 28TH 1824” (all written in uppercase). The words continue, but reading them is a challenge because they are interrupted by the post and the black trimming running right through the middle of the ‘page’ (ahhh… so perhaps the shape is meant suggest a scrappy page out of Oxley’s diary!?). They run something like this:

A CALM … NIGHT
LANDING A…T THREE
QUARTERS…MILE FROM
OUR SLEE… PLACE.
TO LOOK…WATER,
WHICH WE…UND IN
NDANC…ND OF
…ALITY.
BEIN…S SEASON
A CHAIN…ONDS
WATERING…VALLEY

Eventually it culminates at the famous reference to a “FIRST SETTLEME…P THE RIVER”.

I knew what I was looking for. I visited the place with the specific aim of seeing how Oxley’s diary had been reflected in the new courtyard. I only noticed these posts because I was looking for something, and I only noticed that there was writing on them because I was looking for that too. And had I not already been familiar with this particular diary entry, I wouldn’t have had the foggiest idea what the words were trying to say, or where they came from.

So much for the skinny post. What about the fat one with the river running across it? I don’t even know. Even by zooming in on my photo I can only read half of it. Maybe it’s another page from Oxley’s diary. Or maybe it’s from another document describing the area. As far as I could tell, there was nothing to provide an explanation (perhaps I just didn’t look hard enough).

I honestly can’t view this installation as anything other than a dismal failure. It accomplishes virtually nothing, except to cause confusion to anyone who happens to notice it in the first place. If someone unfamiliar with the story of Oxley’s landing can look at it and deduce something about the history of this site, and the reason for the building’s name, then I take my hat off to them.

Or have I missed something?

Milton Drain’s tidal limits

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Last Saturday (the 12th of January) we had a particularly high tide. According to willyweather.com, high tide at the Port Office was 2.7m at 10:51am. The Bureau of Meteorology’s tide tables suggest that we won’t get another tide this big (give or take a few centimetres) until the 26th of May.1

Tides at the Brisbane Port Office for the week of 8 January 2013, according to willyweather.com.

Tides at the Brisbane Port Office for the week of 8 January 2013, according to willyweather.com.

I was aware of this only because a couple of weeks earlier I had passed by the Milton Drain and noticed that it was unusually full. When I looked up the tide tables to see how that tide rated, I found that an even higher one was coming. So I made a point of visiting the drain at high tide on the 12th of January. I even put a reminder in my phone. Yes, this is the sort of thing that I do.

Here is what I saw:

Milton Drain at high tide on 12 January 2013.

Milton Drain at high tide on 12 January 2013.

The water level must have been barely half a metre below Milton Road. At the other end of Milton Park, the water was just a few centimetres from the top of the concrete:

Milton Drain at high tide on 12 January 2013.

Milton Drain at high tide on 12 January 2013.

Milton Drain at high tide on 12 January 2013.

Milton Drain at high tide on 12 January 2013.

Not much room to move, is there?

I’m not sure how much higher the tides get than this; I’ve never studied them before. Next January, BoM’s tide tables predict a tide about 10cm higher than this one, and the maximum last year was just as high. So it looks like Milton Drain is built more or less exactly to the height of the highest high tide that typically occurs. This is all well and good, unless of course there happens to be stormwater flowing through the drain as well. If a tide like this coincided with heavy local rain, the drain would spill over into Milton Park (as I’m sure it has on many an occasion). And if the river is already swollen from rain further upstream — well, we know what happens then.

What I didn’t think to do was to see if the water was visible through any of the drains in Gregory Park or even Rosalie, as a tide like this would have surely reached that far. I did, however, get down to the river later that afternoon, and saw clear signs that the water had spilled over onto the bike track just downstream of the old floating restaurant. But I didn’t have my camera with me. Perhaps in May . . .

Notes:

  1. TidesChart is another useful source of information about tides and local conditions. ↩

Floods aniversary special

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Two years ago today, Rosalie and many other parts of Brisbane were underwater. Any misconceptions we had about the power of Wivenhoe Dam to save us from ever being flooded again were swept away, and before long, attention turned to what, if anything, we could do to stop this from happening again.

In a post in The Forum (actually the first!), a visitor named Barry noted that the Council plans to install a floodgate at the mouth of Western Creek (Milton Drain) to mitigate future flooding in Milton and Auchenflower. As in many other parts of Brisbane in January 2011, the floodwaters that inundated the Western Creek catchment did not spill over the riverbanks, but entered instead via the stormwater drains that discharge to the river. The diagram below, taken from the Council’s fact sheet on backflow flooding, illustrates how this kind of flooding occurs.

Concept diagram of backflow flooding, taken from the Brisbane City Council's <a href="http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/downloads/environment_waste/water/Backflow%20Fact%20Sheet%20June%202012.pdf">factsheet</a>.

Concept diagram of backflow flooding, taken from the Brisbane City Council’s factsheet.

The Council has indeed stepped up to the plate and has already started building backflow prevention devices in Milton and elsewhere. And among the areas that have been flagged for future attention is the mouth of Western Creek.

This is a laudable idea, but the Council can hardly claim credit for it. The idea of using floodgates to protect Milton and Rosalie has been doing the rounds for over a century. In a new page entitled Backflow to the Future, or: How we learned to stop worrying and love the floods, I present a retrospective of these past proposals, courtesy of newspaper clippings from The Brisbane Courier and The Courier Mail that I have found while trawling through Trove.

The title of the essay is strictly tongue-in-cheek, and I’ll admit, downright cheeky. I’m not suggesting for a minute that we really enjoy the floods, and I don’t want to offend anyone who has suffered from them. But I do hope to put into stark focus the question of why, after all these years, we have not adopted such simple measures as floodgates to ease the pain. And I confess, the temptation to structure an essay around Dr Strangelove was just too much for me to resist.

I hope you enjoy the new page. It has been a fascinating journey to write.

-Angus

Picturing the past

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If a picture says a thousand words, then today’s post should more than compensate for the lack of writing that I’ve done in recent weeks.

For a while now I have been collecting any historical photographs I can find of The Western Creek catchment and surrounding area. So far these are limited to those that have already been catalogued and digitised by the State Library of Queensland, the Queensland State Archives, the Brisbane City Council and the National Library of Australia. I like to think that there are still some more old photos out there, waiting to be dusted off and contributed to collections like these.

Rather than just post the photos I’ve collected into a standard gallery, I’ve done my best to determine where they were taken so that they can be put onto a map. The resulting map will live on this page under The Gallery, but the smaller version below provides a sneak-peak. You can navigate the map and click on the photos to view them.


View Western Creek History in a larger map

An open drain in a backyard at Ellena Street, c1905. (State Library of Queensland, Image no. 47486)

An open drain in a backyard at Ellena Street, c1905. (State Library of Queensland, Image no. 47486)

Among the highlights is the photo below from 1905, which shows a very sad and sorry looking creek bed flowing (according to the original caption) between Fernberg Road and Beck Street (then known as Mary Street). I suspect it was taken not far from Ellena Street, looking up towards Fernberg Road and Given Terrace. This creek bed could very well be the main channel of Western Creek. Another photo (see right) shows an open drain in a backyard in Ellena Street; I suspect this is also the main channel of Western Creek, just metres upstream of the other photo. Alternately, one or both photos could be of a tributary to the main channel. Whichever the case, these pictures neatly capture the fate of many waterways like Western Creek that stood in the path of early development. Besides these, I know of no other photos depicting the original channel of Western Creek.

Old creek bed running between Fernberg Road and Mary Street, Paddington, ca. 1905. (State Library of Queensland, Negative no. 47487)

Old creek bed running between Fernberg Road and Mary Street, Paddington, ca. 1905. (State Library of Queensland, Negative no. 47487)

The Langsville Bridge at Auchenflower, ca. 1914. John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland, Neg: 10579.

The Langsville Bridge at Auchenflower, ca. 1914. John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland, Neg: 10579.

Also on the map are several photos of the River Road (Coronation Drive), including some of the bridge over Langsville Creek, which flowed through what is now Moorlands Park. Or perhaps some of these show the bridge over Western Creek instead — I confess that in some cases I am not sure, and I don’t trust some of the original captions either!

There are lots more that I could talk about, but instead I’ll leave you to explore the map yourself. If you spot a photo that you think is out of place, please let me know. And if you know of any photos that are not included, particularly from sources other than the ones I have used, I would love to see them.

Floods

1893 flood taken from the Rosalie Torwood area looking towards old Bishopsbourne. (State Library of Queensland, Image number: 6288-0001-0001)

1893 flood taken from the Rosalie Torwood area looking towards old Bishopsbourne. (State Library of Queensland, Image number: 6288-0001-0001)

Not surprisingly, many of the surviving historical photos of this area were taken during floods, including those that occurred in 1890, 1893 and 1930. Several of these are on the map, but there are several others whose locations I have been unable to determine. I’ll make these the topic of a separate page or post in the near future.

Guppies & Geysers – Stories from the drains of Western Creek

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At about 10.30am on Saturday morning, a freak storm raced through Brisbane. The rain was so heavy that parts of Gregory Park went underwater, bringing back memories of the lead-up to the 2011 flood and reminding us again of this park’s swampy origins. Unfortunately I was not in a position to take any photos, given that I was viewing the scene through the window of an ambulance, having just broken my wrist after slipping on the flooded kitchen floor. But that’s another story.

Gregory Park starts to fill (January 11, 2011)

Gregory Park starts to fill (January 11, 2011)

Unlike in 2011, the water in Gregory Park on Saturday came not from the rising river (though the high tide certainly played a role), but from the stormwater racing through the catchment upstream. It’s easy to forget how much water gets channeled through the drains that are tucked away beneath our roads, footpaths and backyards. The fact that we so rarely think about them is a testament to how well these drains have been engineered: they’ve been sized to the right capacity, built to the correct gradient and constructed to withstand the pressure of the gushing water.

But that’s not to say that our drains were all built right the first time around. In the pages of The Brisbane Courier from the late 1800s and early 1900s there is no shortage of Council minutes and letters to the editor complaining of ineffective, faulty and smelly drains. And as you can read in this brand new page contributed by Steven Cowley, some drains in the area were still a work in progress even as late as the 1970s. Steven has recorded some wonderful stories recalled by his friend Rhonda, who grew up in Herbert Street in the 1970s. A brick drain used to run through Rhonda’s backyard, and in heavy rain the drain would often burst, sending geysers of water into the air. This was no doubt an exciting spectacle for a child, but a big nuisance for the council workers (and sometimes Rhonda’s father) who had to repair the damage.

The drain pit in Norman Buchan Park, after rain. This was once a favourite spot for the kids of the neighbourhood.

The drain pit in Norman Buchan Park, after rain. This was once a favourite spot for the kids of the neighbourhood.

In drier times, the neighbourhood drains were also a place of exploration and discovery for Rhonda and her friends. The big pit in Norman Buchan Park was teeming with guppies, tadpoles, and even eels (I can verify that there are still eels in this drain!). The boys, being somewhat more adventurous — and much less sensible — than the girls, ventured some distance into the drain, getting as far as Gregory Park before the water got too deep and smelly. Rhonda now acknowledges how dangerous all this was, and advises against anyone doing it today. I find it interesting though, that without a creek to explore, kids often turn to the next closest thing: the drain that replaced it.

Rhonda also remembers the lower end of Western Creek before the old bridge was replaced and the banks were concreted over. ‘It used to be a place where you could sit’, she recalls. You could even catch a fish or crab for dinner.

The new page is called Guppies & geysers: memories of playing around and under Paddington in the 1970s. I am hoping that Rhonda’s stories will be familiar to some of you. I get the impression that exploring the drains in Norman Buchan Park was once something of a rite of passage for kids in this neighbourhood. Or perhaps you remember the old bridge and creek banks where Western Creek met the river. If you have any stories to tell or memories to share, I’d love to hear from you.