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Waterford Protestant-Catholic rivalry was intense in the early colony. The Rev. Dr. John Dunmore Lang organized to bring Protestant settlers out to Queensland, and Bishop James Quinn formed the Queensland Immigration Society to bring Irish Catholic settlers out. But that was not the Bishop of Brisbane's only motive in doing this. He wanted to relieve the suffering of people in his Irish homeland caused by their eviction from lands held by their English rulers, and with the help of Father Patrick Dunne, organized for the ship Erin-go-Braghn to leave Waterford in Ireland, 7 February, 1862, bound for Moreton Bay, with 431 immigrants on board, 54 of whom died on board, mainly from typhoid fever. So these Irish immigrants many of whom settled in this area named the district Waterford. Previously the Aboriginal people had called it Tygum, meaning large. Shortly afterwards German settlers were to follow. The Irish Waterford, literally meaning an inlet in which one could take shelter from the weather, was one of a number of Norse settlements established around the Irish Sea in the 9th century. In 1649 it successfully resisted as attack by Cromwell's forces, only to fall to his general, Ireton, in the following year.
General Sir Archibald Wavell,
who was Commander-in-Chief in the Middle East during part of the Second
World War, had many Australian soldiers serving under him, and when
this area was subdivided after the war his name was given to this part
of expanding Brisbane. Wavell was stocky in build, had deep furrows on
either side of his mouth and usually a twinkle in one eye. The other
eye was a glass one for he lost it at Ypres during the First World War. Jacob Weller, a tailor, bought
land on the hill from James Toohey in 1894. Weller was of German
descent and his name has been spelt in different ways. That is why the
hill on which he lived has sometimes been called Weiller's Hill. It was
officially given its present name in 1948. Ignoring the Aboriginal name
of Cullen-Cullen, Surveyor Warner named Wellington Point after the Iron
Duke, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, who had been born a younger
son of an English lord in Ireland and who rose to fame as leader of the
British armies in the second decade of the 19th century. His most
notable victory was that over Napoleon at Waterloo. He became Prime
Minister in 1827, but his opposition to letting the common people vote
and his use of the army against workers trying to stand up for their
rights earned him the anger of many. John Campbell gained the
nickname of Tinker when he brought a consignment of tinware with him
for trade with the Aboriginal people when he migrated from Maine, USA.
He selected a run of 110,000 acres on the Darling Downs in 1841 which
he named Westbrook.
The Aboriginal name for the area was Boccaninnie (old woman). The Aboriginal name for the area was Kuripla, the place for rats, but people who had come out from England had London's West End in mind when they gave this name to this area of South Brisbane which had once been so thickly covered with scrub. Weyba A number of places along the Sunshine
Coast end in -ba, this being the Aboriginal term for place. Weyba (or it
has earlier been spelt Weiba and Wyeba) probably means the place of stingrays or
it could be the place of the flying squirrels. Whinstanes on the Pinkenba line was named after a nearby residence owned by
A.B.Webster. Bob White and his wife first
settled in Maryborough (Q) when they came to Australia. They moved
later to Red Hill, and then again to this area where they became
pioneer settlers, 1873. It was said that, 'The hill was too steep for
grazing and too poor for farming, rock lay just under the soil, but Mr
White liked the view.' The Aboriginal name for the hill was
Bulimba, a name that Europeans borrowed for another location. |