Place Names of South-East Queensland

Bowenville

A town was surveyed and allotments advertised for sale, 6 December, 1860, near the Long Waterhole outstation on the Jondaryan station. It was called Bown in honour of the Governor, Sir George Bown, who passed through the area around that time. However the name was changed to Bowenville in 1862 because the name of Bowen was taken by the settlement on Port Denison in North Queensland.  

Boyland

George Boyland was Chairman of the Tamborine Shire Council at the time of his death. The area gained its name through the naming of the train station after the Boyland family.

Bracalba        

This is supposed to have been the native name for a scrub on the D'Aguilar Range.

Bracken Ridge

The Ferguson family called their property Bracken Ridge because the area was covered with a good growth of bracken. This long, coarse fern which goes by the scientific name of Pteridium esculentum, is poisonous to cattle. When the area was subdivided during the great land boom of the 1880s the developer called the subdivision Bracken Ridge Estate.

Bray Park

John Bray was a Shire Councillor in the Pine Rivers Shire from May 1946 to March 1973, and at the time that he retired was the longest serving Shire Chairman in the state. His father, Thomas Nathaniel Bray, had moved into the district in 1900. After leasing property for a few years he bought his own dairy farm on Gympie Road, a farm which John later took over.  

Brassall

The name of this Ipswich suburb, which from 1860 to 1917 was a separate local government area,  goes back to 6 October, 1851 when used by the surveyor James Warner.

Breakfast Creek

On Thursday, 16 September, 1824, John Oxley, Alan Cunningham and Lieutenant Butler, with nine boatmen and servants, travelling in two boats, left the brig Amity moored off Redcliffe Point and rowed to the mouth of the Brisbane River. They travelled upstream to the head of what Oxley called Sea Reach and camped the night at a grassy spot on the bank there. Four of the local Aboriginal inhabitants came around as they were setting up camp. The country was in the grip of drought, and a reedy swamp nearby linked to the river by a creek had dried up. The only water they found was brackish and undrinkable, so they had to open their water cask that evening.

They woke next morning to a slight fog and tried again to find fresh water but without success. They ate a hasty breakfast without any water and hurried to pack up. Their idea was to press on to the point where Oxley had discovered, in the previous year, that the river turned fresh. The inquisitive natives came back and took off with a mountain barometer, a case of drawing tablets and some other things. The exploring party only recovered their possessions after the discharge of a firearm by Lieutenant Butler. After this incident, they pushed off around 8 am.  The creek near which this occurred they referred to as Breakfast Creek. It had been a dry, but memorable breakfast. 

Breaksea Spit

Named by Lieutenant James Cook, 1770.

Bremer

The Bremer River was named by the explorer John Oxley in 1824 after Captain James John Gordon Bremer RN whom he had met in Sydney shortly before coming north on the trip to establish the new settlement at Moreton Bay. Bremer, in command of the Tamar, was  on his way to select a site for a trading settlement somewhere along the northern coast of what is now the Northern Territory. The idea was to set up a trading post which would allow British incursions into the rich East Indies trade. The whole scheme was a fiasco, but Bremer believed in it and recommended a site on Melville Island. After Fort Dundas there failed, the British tried again at Fort Wellington. Later he was sent out in charge of yet a third attempt, this time at Port Victoria. It fared no better.
James, later Sir James, came from a family of naval officers and ended up as a Rear Admiral the year before he died at the age of 64. 

Bribie Island

There are not many place names which perpetuate the names of convicts, but Bribie Island is one of them, according to Thomas Welby.  Bribie may have been the man's nickname, although some give his name at Brieby. Some have suggested that he got his name from the way he bought privileges from the authorities. It seems he supplied them with fish.

He was a basket-maker and fish-trapper, and these skills seem to have made him a valued member of both white and Aboriginal societies. He took up with an Aboriginal woman, and when his term of sentence was about to expire ran away to live permanently with her and her tribe on the island. Other convicts found sanctuary there as well. When a convict went missing, it was common to hear it said around Brisbane Town that he was, 'Down with Bribie.'  This became' 'Down at Bribie,' and so the island got its name. However Warwick Outram suggests that the name derives from the original Aboriginal name for the island itself, Boorabee.

"Bribie" was not the first white person to live with the natives on this island. Thomas Pamphlett and John Finnegan were found there in 1823 by John Oxley when he came looking for a site for a new convict settlement. They were two of a four-man crew who had sailed out of Sydney Heads to get cedar logs from the Illawarra district, but were blown way off course by a storm. One died at sea, but the three that were left eventually came ashore on Moreton Island. They were befriended by the Aboriginal people. In the following year, Oxley found the other member of their crew, Richard Parsons, also on Bribie Island. 

Bridgeman Downs

Bridgeman Downs was named in 1975 after Henry StJohn Bridgemen who owned a considerable portion of land there, but he never lived there. He worked for the Customs Department and held property around Boondall as well as this property between the suburbs of Albany Creek and Aspley which he bought in 1860 and sold to the Catholic Church in 1877 who eventually subdivided it in 1957.

Bridges

The railway siding near Yandina was named in 1918 after Major-General William T. Bridges, commander of the Australian Imperial Forces, who died of wounds at Gallipoli 1915.   For the previous seven years it had been called Ninderry by  Queensland Railways.

Brigalow                    

The name was suggested by the variety of acacia known as brigalow growing in the area.   


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