South East Queensland - History

History

South East Queensland was home to around 20,000 Aboriginals at the time of James Cook's voyage along the east coast of Australia. According to Aboriginal history researchers the indigenous population declined to around 10,000 over the next 60 years.

Early explorers in the area including Matthew Flinders, Allan Cunningham, John Oxley and Patrick Logan. Around 1839, European settlers were able to move into the region. Logging was the first industry to develop. The first railway built in Queensland linked Grandchester to Ipswich in 1865 along a narrow 1067 mm gauge.

Major floods were experienced in 1893, 1974 and 2011. In 2005, the region suffered its worst drought in recorded history.

See also: History of Brisbane

Read more about this topic:  South East Queensland

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    “Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
    —Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)

    “Spain is an overflow of sombreness ... a strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.”
    —Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)

    “We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
    —Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)