Place Names of South-East Queensland

  

 

 

Miles

Leichhardt named Dogwood Creek and the little settlement which grew up nearby was called Dogwood Crossing. The name Miles commemorates a local landholder, William Miles, who was a Member of Parliament 1865-1887. 

William Miles was born at Slateford, near Edinburgh, in 1817 and came to Australia with his wife in 1838. He gained experience in the pastoral industry by working on  a number of properties where he gained the reputation of having a sympathetic attitude toward the Aboriginal people.  He became a member of the Queensland Parliament in 1865 and remain in parliament until his death in 1887. 

Millmerran

The name comes from the Aboriginal meel translated as eye, and merran meaning to look out. A site nearby was apparently used as a lookout by Aboriginal people.   When the area around here was first thrown open for closer settlement it was simply known as Back Creek, part of the vast Yandilla  station. For a while it was called Domville, but in 1895 it became Millmerran.  

Milton

If some Brisbane suburban names testify to royalist sentiments, Milton points to a famous anti-royalist writer of the 17th century. John Milton, better known as a poet, the author of Paradise Lost, spent much of his life writing pamphlets against episcopacy and monarchy. He was a Puritan in the days of Oliver Cromwell in England.

The suburb was not named directly after the blind poet, but rather after a property there. Two names are associated with the development of this property: Ambrose Eldridge, a pharmacist who had gone bankrupt in Sydney before moving north and who, by 1853, had tried growing cotton on land in the 'western suburbs' of Brisbane, and John Frederick McDougall, a pastoralist who lost his properties on the other side of the Great Dividing Range in the 1894 crash. It was the Railway Department's choice of this name for the station which gave the name to the suburb.  

Minden

At the suggestion of early German settlers, the town was, in 1879, named Minden  after a town of that name in Westphalia, Germany.  During the First World War it was re-named Frenchton, but the name of Minden was restored in 1930.  

Mitchelton

Mitchelton was named after Nicholas Mitchell whose farm, purchased in 1875, was subdivided in 1894 as Mitchelton Estate.  

Miva

According to the Queensland Railways, in one dialect this Aboriginal word meant stoney knob, but in another dialect referred to the Moreton Bay chestnut.  

Moggill

The suburban area gets its name from the creek,  said to mean home of the Easter Water Dragon, Maggil in the Yugarubal language of the Jagara people. However Archibald Meston said that Mohgil was the word used  for a head in the language of the Brisbane River Aborigines.

John Williams mined for coal on the bank of the river there in 1849, but it was John Dunmore Lang who promoted the area as a most favourable locality for settlement with the result that some of his immigrants who came out on the Fortitude settled there on Pullen Pullen Creek.  

Molendinar

George Hope was familiar with Molendinar Burn that flowed through Glasgow and so named his property by that name in Queensland. When a railway station was built on his land in 1891 it was called Molendinar

Montville

This town on the Blackall Range was named after the town of Montville in the American state of Connecticut. Originally known as Razorback, it was re-named by Henry and Edward Smith on the request of their mother, giving recognition to the town she, as Emma Irons,  had come from.  

Moogerah

The name which was originally  given to a pioneer licensed holding is derived from  the Aboriginal name for the locality. It was an appropriate name for the area, meaning land of thunderstorms. The Depratment of Public Instruction gave the name to the school in 1908. Moogerah Dam has, more recently, been formed by a dam built across Reynolds Creek.  

Moola

The Aboriginal name for this district once covered in dense brigalow scrub was one which meant the shady place.  

Mooloolaba

Ba  meant place of, but what did Mooloola mean ?   It seems there may have been two very similar Aboriginal words, one meaning red-bellied black snake, the other meaning schnapper fish. In 1862 the name for the cattle run here was Moolooloo. The township was originally referred to by white people as Mooloolah Heads.  Mooloolaba was adopted in 1910 when Thomas O'Connor subdivided some of his land.  

Mooloolah

The name is said to have been derived from an Aboriginal word for the red bellied black snake.

Moore

The township was named after the Moore family who owned Colinton station. 

Moore's Pocket

The Moore after whom this part of Ipswich was named was a Thomas Moore, blacksmith and wheelwright, who lived in Ipswich around 1846.  

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