Early in the period of Brisbane’s colonisation, the Brisbane Municipal Council had marked York’s Hollow as a water reserve, being one of the main catchments of the city’s water supply. In 1863—at the prompting of the Council—the local government declared the lands of Barrambin (Victoria Park) to be a reserve for recreational use (Greenwood & Laverty, 1959). The Queensland Acclimatisation Society were the first to reserve a parcel of the land thereafter, drawing a boundary that sectioned the northeastern end of York’s Hollow off for their work (Brouwer, 2003). The acclimatisation gardens were established on the slopes of Gregory Terrace, where the Royal National Association’s showgrounds are presently located.
Prior to the Society’s occupation of the area, Barrambin had been the site of various European brickmaking establishments (Petrie, 1904) which had left the land pockmarked with brickfields (Brouwer, 2003). In 1869, six years after the reservation had been delineated, Lewis A. Bernays described the Society’s reworking of the land to suit their purposes as a process of “blotting out the legacy of ugliness” (Bernays, 1869, p. 1) which entailed filling swamps and planting the banks with trees and shrubs to render its features “beautiful” to the European gaze.
These lands, now sequestered from the city and divested—to the municipal government’s best efforts—of their original swampland ecosystem, were rendered a fit place for introducing foreign animals and plants to Queensland. This was another in a series of efforts to make Queensland more closely resemble the homelands of its colonial population and to introduce “economically useful” crops such as sugarcane and maize (Brouwer, 2003; Osborne, 2008): in effect, the native biodiversity of the area had been supplanted, by design, with foreign flora and fauna.
By 1890, the acclimatisation society was gradually losing usefulness in the government’s eyes, while the Royal National Association gained in the same. The extent of the acclimatisation grounds was gradually reduced by RNA leases, until the former organisation had completely given the land over to the latter (Osborne, 2008). From then till now, the place has been known as part of the Brisbane Showgrounds.
Some traces of the Acclimatisation Society still remain in the form of gardens near the Showgrounds (Brouwer, 2003), separated from the rest of York’s Hollow by the Inner City Bypass. All water that ran there has been channelled into large subterranean stormwater drains—some of the largest seen on our treks. Its history as the bed of a larger swamp has been buried under a century of landscaping and urbanisation works, in continuous attempts to foist upon the land biota it did not naturally support.
References
Bernays, L. A. (1869, February 6). The Acclimatisation Society and Its Doings. Brisbane Courier.
Brouwer, C. (2003). The Acclimatisation Society Gardens. Queensland Review, 10(2), 37–46. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1321816600003299
Greenwood, G., & Laverty, J. (1959). Brisbane 1859 to 1959: A history of local government. Oswald Ziegler. https://digitalcollections.qut.edu.au/6335/
Osborne, P. (2008). The Queensland Acclimatisation Society: Challenging the stereotype. Queensland History Journal, 20(8), 337–350.
Petrie, C. C. (1904). Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland. Watson Ferguson & Co. https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks20/2000451h.html