Brisbane History

Brisbane was first founded in 1824 at what is now Redcliffe on Moreton Bay, as a penal colony for Sydney’s expanding population of convicts. Due to lack of fresh water and hostility from the Aborigines, the colony was moved to the banks of the Brisbane River, becoming the blueprint for what is now Brisbane. The area suffered at the hands of crooked officials and was abandoned in 1839. It wasn’t until the Moreton Bay area was resettled by free settlers in 1842 that Brisbane began to take shape, much to the consternation of the local Aborigines who suffered at the hands of the white settlers. Queensland formerly separated from New South Wales in 1859, by which time Brisbane was a city of 6000 residents. The gold-rush and pastoral enterprises would see the city prosper but while the city grew, it never found its niche that Sydney and Melbourne enjoyed. It wasn’t until the 1982 Commonwealth Games, the 1988 World Expo and the 2001 Goodwill Games that Brisbane earned international exposure as well as cementing its reputation as a forward and positive-thinking, yet youthful, creatively confident city.