How oncewasacreek happened

There once was a creek that began in the hills of Rainworth (Brisbane, Australia) and flowed through what is now Rosalie Village, where it mingled with a large swamp (now Gregory Park) before winding its way through Milton to the Brisbane River. Except for a few small temporary streams at the top of the catchment, little can be seen of this creek now. For most of its length it has been pushed underground into a network of stormwater drains, with the remainder converted into a large concrete canal.

I knew nothing about this creek when I moved to Rosalie in 2010, even though I had lived in the nearby suburbs for all of my thirty years to that point. By the time the flood hit in January 2011, I’d become dimly aware of a creek-sized hole in my life, having taken for granted the presence of Ithaca Creek throughout my formative years, and Toowong Creek when I lived in a sharehouse near Toowong High School.

The flood changed everything. It didn’t reach the house in Howard Street where I was living, but it did seep into my imagination and stir my curiosity. I started to wonder: if this is where the water likes to flow, why isn’t there a creek? The answer, of course, was simple: there was a creek once, but a suburb was built on top of it. I’d known this area all my life, but this simple realisation changed my perspective completely. I’d always taken the urban landscape for granted; it had never occurred to me that so many of our streets and houses and parks were built on top of waterways.

The flood merged with a confluence of other events that channelled my curiosity into Rosalie’s lost creek. When I showed my mother the photo I’d taken of ‘Lake Gregory’, she told me that she’d just read in Matthew Condon’s book, Brisbane, that Gregory Park used to be Red Jacket Swamp, and it was part of a creek that John Oxley described as a ‘chain of ponds’ in 1824.

Meanwhile, one of my neighbours at the time happened to be Marci Webster-Mannison, then a lecturer in the Architecture School at the University of Queensland who had made Western Creek a subject of study for her sustainable design students. I honestly can’t remember the order of events anymore, but a conversation with her almost certainly planted one of the seeds that grew into this site.

And by this time, I’d been working in and around water policy in the Queensland Government for several years, and was familiar with catchments as an organising principle for managing natural resources. The flood made me realised that catchments were just as important for understanding my own neighbourhood.

So I set out to recreate Rosalie’s missing creek, if only in my mind’s eye. I found myself trawling through old newspaper articles on Trove, visiting libraries and surveying local streets in an effort to re-imagine a now extinct stream. Somewhere along the way (to be specific, I believe it was on Runic street on the afternoon of Sunday 9 October, 2011), it dawned on me that this venture would make more sense if I could share it and draw on the collective knowledge of other people who know this area.

A few months later, oncewasacreek.org went live. It was mostly a statement of ambition in the form of empty pages in a menu structure, except for a detailed tour of the creek and catchment, and a 10,000 word essay on the history of Gregory Park.

As much as I enjoyed trawling through Trove and other archives, part of my mission was to draw on the knowledge of people who had lived in the area. To this end, I roamed the neighbourhood posting these on noticeboards and street poles:

I even included a ‘Forum’ page where users could discuss specific topics and places. That may seem strange now, but this was before Facebook took off and became the new centre of the internet for local history enthusiasts.

Inquiries and contributions came in a steady trickle rather than a torrent, but over time I did receive amazing pieces of information in post comments, the forum, and emails. Among the highlights were a fantastic guest post from Steven Cowley about growing up in Rosalie in the 1970s, and the amazing information about the history of the Couldrey Street clearing from Jonathon and Di Freer. I had the pleasure of working with Trish Fitzsimons to trace some of the history of Norman Creek for the Norman Creek Catchment group. I even received an email (and some old files, which are still in the cupboard) from Allan Miles, who wrote a fantastic unpublished history of Rosalie back in 1978. Along the way, I also got to speak at meetings of various historical societies and catchment groups.

About a year after the site launched, it received a massive boost in the form of the research grant voluntary redundancy I accepted when Queensland’s newly installed premier Campbell Newman took an axe to the public service. And so the website flourished until late 2014, when it slowed to a trickle after I started a PhD about computational analysis of news texts (it was supposed to be about digital history methods, but circumstances beyond my control intervened). After that, I moved to Melbourne, got married, found employment, and effectively moved on from oncewasacreek, save for the occasional email from people who had stumbled across the site and wanted to ask a question or express their thanks. It was partly for people like them, and partly for my own sense of pride and dim hope that I might revive the project, that I kept the site online while it gathered cyberdust.

The 2026 reboot