Tag Archives: rosalie

Here we go again . . .

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I don’t know about you, but I didn’t expect to be seeing scenes like these just a couple of years after January 2011. (See the new Gallery page for more pictures of today’s flooding.)

Gregory Park, 28 January 2013. The tide was still rising, and water was gushing into the park through this drain.

Gregory Park, 28 January 2013. The tide was still rising, and water was gushing into the park through this drain.

Milton Drain, from the mystery building on Milton Park, 28 January 2013.

Milton Drain, from the mystery building on Milton Park, 28 January 2013.

Then again, we shouldn’t be surprised: there’s no reason why floods should be spaced out evenly over time. Indeed, the historical record of Brisbane’s floods suggests that they often come in twos or threes.

Flood events greater than 1.7m in the Brisbane River since 1841. Also shown are the estimated mitigating impacts of river works and the two dams. All data sourced from the Brisbane River Flood Study except the effect of the two dams, which is indicative only and has been inferred from an analysis on page 523 of the final report of the Flood Commission of Inquiry.

Flood events greater than 1.7m in the Brisbane River since 1841. Also shown are the estimated mitigating impacts of river works and the two dams. All data sourced from the Brisbane River Flood Study except the effect of the two dams, which is indicative only and has been inferred from an analysis on page 523 of the final report of the Flood Commission of Inquiry.

Meanwhile, just downstream . . .

A duckbill valve on the riverbank at Milton

A duckbill valve on the riverbank at Milton

I’m also guessing that the Brisbane City Council wasn’t expecting their new backflow prevention devices to be put to use so soon. As explained in my essay Backflow to the Future, the Council has recently installed duckbill valves and flap-gates to prevent flooding in several locations, including the Cribb Street drainage system in Milton. This area spans between Cribb Street and Park Road.

After my little adventure this morning I took a walk around this area and could see no evidence of flooding. Unless this whole area is higher up than the Western Creek area (which I do not believe to be the case), this means that the duckbills and flap-gates are doing their job.

If this is the case then the Council can give itself a pat on the back. And if it has any sense, the Council will look for ways to tell everyone how many properties these devices saved from being flooded. Then again, the Council may not want to create too much work for itself. Before long, every suburb in Brisbane will be wanting one of these duckbill thingies . . .

The swamp runneth over

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Since starting this project, one thing I’ve been constantly looking out for is old maps. Unless there are some unpublished photos1 or drawings floating around (and I sincerely hope that there are), maps are the only visual record we have of the old Western Creek.

Looking at maps of Brisbane from the late 1800s and early 1900s, you can see the residential lots dissolve into singular paddocks, and the road networks dwindle to just a few major arteries. In the spaces that are left, you can often find details of the underlying landscape. The oldest maps sometimes depict slopes and ridges, some of which have since been reshaped or cut down. And in between the hills you will typically see an abundance of water features — not only rivers and creeks, but also swamps and ponds — that have long since been built over.

In the essay about the history of Gregory Park, I showed how the transition from Red Jacket Swamp to Gregory Park was depicted on maps from 1906, 1896 and 1884:

Queensland Surveyor General's Office (1884), Moreton 20 chains to an inch. Sheet 1B. National Library of Australia: http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/11526397

Present-day Gregory Park depicted in 1884.

Present-day Gregory Park as depicted on McKeller's map of Brisbane, 1895. (Brisbane City Council Archives)

Present-day Gregory Park depicted in 1895

Gregory Park depicted on a map published by the Queensland Department of Public Lands. The base map is dated 1906, but additional roads appear to have been added at a later date. (Brisbane City Council Archives)

Gregory Park depicted in 1906.

 

Plan of Portions 203 to 257 in the Environs of Brisbane, Parish of Enoggera, County of Stanley, New South Wales', 1859. (Queensland State Archives Item ID620656)

Plan of Portions 203 to 257 in the Environs of Brisbane, 1859. (Queensland State Archives Item ID620656)

Continue reading →

Notes:

  1. In the State Library’s catalogue, there is a photos of the old Dunmore Bridge (where Coronation Drive crossed the mouth of the creek) and one of a sad looking ditch somewhere in the vicinity of Beck Street. These are the only photos I know of that show Western Creek. If you know of others, please get in touch with me! ↩

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.
Continue reading →

Notes:

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