Category Archives: Short articles

Detail Plans on Google Earth

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Having recently Google-Earthified several historical maps of the Milton Reach and surrounding suburbs, I thought I’d apply the same technique to some of the City Council’s ‘Detail Plans’. These plans were produced prior to sewerage being installed in Brisbane, and they depict the built environment at a much finer spatial scale than the maps I have used previously. The plans from the Milton and Rosalie areas date primarily from the 1930s, while those further up the Western Creek catchment were made later on, mainly in the 1940s. Each plan covers no more than a few blocks, as in the example below.

Detail Plan no. 771, showing the area between Baroona Road and Elizabeth Street.

Detail Plan no. 771, showing the area between Baroona Road and Elizabeth Street.

These plans show the outline of every house, down to the exact position of its front steps and out-door toilet. They also show things like house names, retaining walls, tram lines, watercourses and drains. Exploring them in Google Earth provides a fascinating way to engage with the history of our built environment.

Rosalie Village as depicted on the City Council's 'Detail Plans' from the 1930s.

Rosalie Village as depicted on the City Council’s ‘Detail Plans’ from the 1930s. The concrete drain is covered except for a small section near Baroona Road. The tram line is also visible.

The complete set for Brisbane contains over 3,000 detail plans. I’ve prepared a sample of just 24 in order to explore the course of Western Creek. The results can be found on this page in the form of a gallery of Google Earth screenshots as well as a link to a file that will enable you to explore the plans directly using Google Earth. If you live in the area, you may be able to find the original outline of your own house, and even the location of the outhouse in the backyard.

Digitised versions of the original plans can be obtained from the Brisbane Images section of the City Council’s library catalogue. They are part of the collection of the Brisbane City Archives. I would particularly like to thank Annabel Lloyd from the Archives for providing me with the plans and answering my many questions about them.

Map Mania!

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In several posts and pages now I have used screenshots from Google Earth showing overlays of historical maps, such as the example below.

Red Jacket Swamp (now Gregory Park and Frew Park), as depicted in 1850.

Red Jacket Swamp (now Gregory Park and Frew Park), as depicted in 1850.

I have found this to be a very useful way to both explore and present these maps, and because Google Earth is freely available, I had also hoped that it would provide a way for me to share these maps with anyone else who wants to explore them. However, until now the files that I have created have been clumsy and unreliable, at times crashing Google Earth as soon as they are opened. The files were also large and inconvenient to download.

I have now worked out how to prepare the maps so that they open quickly and smoothly in Google Earth. In addition, I have managed to host the files remotely so that they can be accessed from anywhere without being downloaded in their entirety. Even better, Google now provides a ‘gadget’ for viewing the files within a web browser without even opening Google Earth!

So, I have re-packaged the most interesting maps in my collection and uploaded them so that you can explore them for your enjoyment. They can be accessed from a brand new Maps page in The Study section of the site, but for convenience the links are also listed here:

Preparing these maps so that they display clearly in Google Earth is a bit of a challenge, and to this end I’ve experimented with various colour schemes in addition to the bright yellow that I have used in these latest versions. This scheme is probably not perfect for all of the maps, but hopefully it is adequate for research and ‘exploration’ purposes.

I hope you enjoy exploring the maps. And most of all, I hope they work! Hosting Google Earth data in this way is new territory for me, so I won’t be surprised if some technical glitches occur. Please report any problems that you experience when using them.

And stay tuned… there may be more maps coming in the near future!

The legend of the lost lagoon

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If you’ve read my earlier post about the Waters of Milton, then you will have already encountered this story, but I’d like to give it a post of its own. It’s the story of a lagoon that existed in the area bounded by Cribb Street, Park Road, Coronation Drive and the railway line — just outside the catchment of Western Creek. The lagoon stretched diagonally across this area from just near the Suncorp Bank on Park Road to where Cribb Street meets Coronation Drive.

The image below shows how the lagoon was depicted by the surveyor James Warner in 1850 on what is possibly the earliest map of the area. Immediately below the map is a screenshot from Google Earth, into which I imported an overlay of Warner’s map. It doesn’t exactly stand out, but if you look closely you can see the lagoon stretched across the modern landscape. In the background, you can also see Boundary Creek snaking through the Coronation Drive Office Park and past Suncorp Stadium.

The lagoon between Cribb Street and Park Road, Mitlon, as depicted in 1850.

A lagoon between Cribb Street and Park Road, Mitlon, as depicted in 1850.

The lagoon that once stretched between Cribb Street and Park road, as depicted on a map from 1850.

The lagoon that once stretched between Cribb Street and Park road, as depicted on a map from 1850.

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Where a creek begins

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A pond in a tributary of Ithaca Creek, Mount Coot-tha. (February 2013)

A pond in a tributary of Ithaca Creek, Mount Coot-tha. (February 2013)

This is just a quick plug for a side-project of mine that has mostly sat on the back-burner since this website was conceived. Before I started mapping out Western Creek in my imagination, I had started to map out Ithaca Creek (a real creek!) photographically. My plan was (and still is) to photograph Ithaca creek from one end to the other, documenting its journey from the headwaters in Mount Coot-tha Forest through to the much more suburban surrounds of Red Hill where it joins its bigger brother, Enoggera Creek.

Ithaca Creek is a neighbour of Western Creek, sharing a catchment boundary along the ridge of Stuartholme Road, Simpson’s Road, Macgregor Terrace and much of Latrobe Terrace.

To see the Ithaca Creek photo-map, click here and then click on the small banner at the top of the page to go to the Picasa Web Album (Google appears to be phasing out Web Albums in favour of the happy-snap functionality of Google+, so I don’t know how long this will remain functional). Beneath the small map on the right-hand side of the album there is a link which takes you to a proper map view of the album.

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Are we learning yet?

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A story in the Brisbane Times this morning, titled Buyers less fearful of flood zones, made me a little bit mad.

Though I try not to buy into the blame game around the 2011 flood, I suspect that the real estate industry is partly responsible for the false sense of security that set in after Wivenhoe Dam was built. I have no proof of this; it is just a hypothesis. But it stands to reason that someone whose job is to sell houses will downplay the risks of flooding any way they can. Buyer beware.

Whether or not real estate agents have done it in the past, they certainly seem to be doing it now.

According to agents working in river precinct suburbs, the percentage of buyers willing to consider properties previously flooded in 2011 has increased significantly because they feel assured that the Wivanhoe Dam did its job in mitigating another flood over the Australia Day weekend.

Granted, this boost in buyers’ confidence is not necessarily the doing of real estate agents. People make their own assessments of risk based on events, and make their own decisions accordingly. Whether those assessments and decisions are justified or wise is an open question, but it is one that needs to be answered with some understanding of the facts about the 2011 and 2013 flood events, what role the dam played in each, and how the two events are comparable. I won’t pretend to have all of those facts. But I humbly suggest that not many real estate agents do either.

The article continues, quoting Brad Robson of Brisbane Real Estate:

“They’re happy that the dam worked. There was a truckload of rain and nothing flooded so it’s given them the confidence to go ahead and make a purchase”

John Johnston, of Johnston Dixon, said the Brisbane River needed a proposed class action by residents to succeed in order to clear its name.

“These properties should never have experienced the flooding that they did in 2011 and the latest weather event last month supports that,” he said.

“The mitigation capacity of the Wivanhoe have now been proven. I’m confident that if this class action goes through, it will largely clear the Brisbane River’s name and buyers will no longer be afraid to purchase near the river.”

Torwood Street during the January 2011 flood

Torwood Street during the January 2011 flood

There you have it: the smallness of the 2013 flood proves that the 2011 flood did not need to happen. It was all the fault of the dam operators. They are guilty, and the river is innocent — we just need to ‘clear its name’!

I’ll stress again that I do not know all of the relevant facts. But in case someone else has the inclination to go do some homework, I suggest that the following questions would be a good place to start:

  • Could it be that the 2013 flood was smaller than the 2011 flood because there was less rain?
  • Where did the “truckload of rain” that fell in 2013 actually fall? According to our Premier and the Bureau of Meteorology, the flooding in 2013 was caused by rain that fell in catchments that discharge to the Brisbane River downstream of Wivenhoe Dam. Suppose that even more rain (a shipload?) fell in those catchments: would the dam save us then?
  • Could there be any truth in the Flood Commission’s finding, stated on page 524 of the Commission’s final report, “that, allowing for the limits of the strategies in the Wivenhoe manual, the flood engineers achieved close to the best possible flood mitigation result for the January 2011 flood event”?

I’m not presuming that the dam manual is perfect, that the dam operators did a perfect job, or that there are not lessons to be learned from the way the 2011 flood was managed. And I’m not offering an opinion on whether a class action against the government’s management of the flood is warranted. But I do think that comments such as those above from the real estate industry are grossly irresponsible, and are the absolute last thing we need if we are to to learn from past events and become better informed about the nature of flood risks in Brisbane.

Buyer beware.