Category: New pages
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The next generation of map overlays
Historical maps and survey plans were central to oncewasacreek from its inception. Reading about Milton’s lost creek in the archives of Trove and in Matthew Condon’s book Brisbane was intriguing, but seeing Western Creek depicted on one of the early maps — probably it was McKellar’s map from 1895 — was for me a revelation.…
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New site map
When I created this site, my vision was of a neat history of the Western Creek catchment. Each part of the catchment would have a page devoted to it, and each page would fit snugly within the structure of the site. But as the site has progressed I have ended up writing about a wider…
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Brisbane,1946… on Google Earth!
As a certain amply-sized entrepreneur of self-branded cleaning products used to say, “I’m excited!” I’m excited because I’ve just made a new gallery featuring aerial imagery from 1946 (the earliest of Brisbane, as far as I know) as you’ve never seen it before: in Google Earth! Even better, you can see the difference between then…
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Detail Plans on Google Earth
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…
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Map Mania!
In several posts and pages now I have used screenshots from Google Earth showing overlays of historical maps, such as the example below. 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…
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Floods aniversary special
Two years ago today, Rosalie and many other parts of Brisbane were underwater. Any misconceptions we had about the power of Wivenhoe Dam to save us from ever being flooded again were swept away, and before long, attention turned to what, if anything, we could do to stop this from happening again. In a post…
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Picturing the past
If a picture says a thousand words, then today’s post should more than compensate for the lack of writing that I’ve done in recent weeks. For a while now I have been collecting any historical photographs I can find of The Western Creek catchment and surrounding area. So far these are limited to those that…
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Guppies & Geysers – Stories from the drains of Western Creek
At about 10.30am on Saturday morning, a freak storm raced through Brisbane. The rain was so heavy that parts of Gregory Park went underwater, bringing back memories of the lead-up to the 2011 flood and reminding us again of this park’s swampy origins. Unfortunately I was not in a position to take any photos, given…
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Once upon a time in the west
I’ve finally finished a new page about the early estates of Milton. This page focuses on the early land divisions in the Milton area, and the houses and farms built on them by the early landowners. It also goes back a bit further, touching on Brisbane’s beginnings as a penal settlement, and further still, revisiting…
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Fun with maps
The icon at the top of this page, and the fuller version on the homepage, features a depiction of Western Creek from A.R. McKellar’s 1895 map of Brisbane overlaid onto the modern landscape. For me, this fusion captured the essence of what the site is about: gaining a deeper understanding the modern landscape though an…