There once was a creek somewhere in your neighbourhood, flowing where no creek flows today. Perhaps it flowed through a nearby park, or beneath what is now a busy street. Maybe it flowed through your own backyard.
Whatever this creek’s story may be, it is a story worth knowing, for it is the story of how your neighbourhood once was, and how it became the landscape that you know today.
Here, you will find the stories of creeks and their catchments from across Brisbane and beyond.
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The broken lands of Toowong
In an earlier post called The Waters of Milton, I explored a survey plan of Milton drawn in 1850. Survey plans are valuable historical artifacts because they generally represent the first efforts to capture the landscape on paper. They reveal natural features that have long since vanished, such as creeks, swamps and even hills. They…
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Uncovering Langsville Creek, Part 3 – The Headwaters
This page is part of a series: I started this series of articles about Langsville Creek as a distraction from my original mission of writing about Western Creek. My new interest soon produced another distraction when I stumbled across a dump of old bottles and cans while exploring Langsville Creek’s headwaters. When I finally finished…
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Topography shock: Postcards from the south
There’s nothing like a change in surroundings to cast your normal environment — that familiar place you call ‘home’ — in a new light. The closer you are to something, the easier it is to forget what makes it special or distinctive. For me, home has always been Brisbane’s western suburbs. I’ve lived in Bardon,…
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Western Creek on display
A few months ago I moved out of Rosalie and the catchment of Western Creek. I didn’t want to leave, but such is the plight of a renter. I now am a citizen of Oxley Creek, which runs through my new neighbourhood of Rocklea. So these days I am writing about Western Creek from a…
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Bottles and cans: an adventure in suburban archaeology
Suburban secrets Since I started chasing lost creeks, I have been drawn to spaces that most people would tend to ignore or avoid. For example, I often find myself peering into drains, which in many urbanised areas are the only waterways left. I’m sometimes tempted to venture inside them, but I rarely do. Out in…
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Uncovering Langsville Creek, Part 2 – The catchment
This page is part of a series: The whole iceberg If you look at the Milton Reach of the river on any of the old maps of Brisbane, such as the one drawn by A.R. McKellar in 1895 (shown to the right), you will notice a creek with several winding branches that meets the river…