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. In that moment, Western Creek graduated from an abstract concept to a physical presence with size, shape and form.

Further revelations came in the early survey plans of the area, which revealed a landscape overflowing with streams, swamps, waterholes and lagoons, all surrounded by various grades of forest, grassland and hills. These documents became foundational to my quest to understand the landscape.

Aligning the past and present

Once you’ve seen a lost creek or waterhole on a map, you immediately start to wonder where it was in relation to the landscape you know today. Some maps include enough roads or other surviving features to make this easy to figure out, but others — especially the oldest ones — do not. In either case, the obvious solution is to combine the old map with a new one so you can see exactly how their features align.

Obvious, but not easy. Even if you have a tool that allows you to drag and resize an old map over modern imagery (the old Google Earth Pro being one example), you quickly learn that not all maps project reality onto the page in the same way. You can make one part of the map align, but only at the expense of the rest. And even if the alignment is good, you might not be satisfied with simply making the old map transparent enough to see the modern map behind it.

I wanted to see the historical features projected more vividly onto the modern landscape. Thankfully, I had just enough experience with GIS software and Photoshop to devise a workflow that not only aligned old and new maps in their entirety,¹ but also isolated the historic features so they could be overlaid cleanly on modern maps or imagery.

The first outputs I shared in 2012 — yes, 14 years ago! — assumed the standard orthographic God’s-eye view of the landscape, but I soon settled on Google Earth as a more immersive and satisfying way to explore these transformed maps and plans.

Nearly every article I posted from that point on includes images like this one. I spent countless hours georeferencing not only maps and survey plans, but also a selection of the Brisbane Water and Sewage Board’s ‘detail plans’ from the 1920s and 1930s, and even parts of the 1946 aerial photographs, just so I could have the satisfaction of seeing them in Google Earth and sharing the results.

The new overlays

I felt then, as I do now, that I was adding considerable value to these already priceless cultural assets. I figured that people could learn and do more with these enhanced versions than with the static, non-georeferenced images that were (sometimes) available from the online archives. But I also felt that my humble blog should not be the place — or at least not the first or only place — where people come to obtain such products. I hoped that the various government agencies that are the custodians of these resources might take some steps towards making them available in a more engaging format.

I confess that I have not kept up with what has or has not happened in this space since then. Literally as I write this post, I’m learning about initiatives such as Allmaps, OldMapsOnline, the National Library of Australia’s Map Search, and Tim Sherratt’s very cool portal to georeferenced maps held by the State Library of Victoria. Just a couple of months ago, I discovered that all 11 sheets of McKellar’s 1895 map of Brisbane can be explored natively within the Queensland Globe platform.

Clearly, progress is being made. But in mid 2026, as I embarked on a rebuild of this website, it seemed that my own overlays are still a unique and useful offering. So I have done my best, with my very modest web development capabilities, to feature them in a more accessible and interactive way.

On the Maps page, you will find a gallery of maps and plans to inspect. Currently there are only six, but hopefully more will follow soon. Select one, and you will be presented with an interactive overlay of the map. In all cases, you can select a specially processed version with the background removed. Some maps also include a layer showing the original version. These aren’t as immersive or visually sumptuous as the versions in Google Earth, but they are hopefully just as useful.

No more secret source

For these interactive overlays, I have rebuilt my workflow using only open-source tools. Originally, I used ESRI ArcMap (the industry standard GIS tool) to align the maps, Adobe Photoshop to extract the features, and a now defunct tool called (I think?) SuperOverlay to create the map tiles and associated KML files that made them available in Google Earth.

My new workflow uses QGIS for the georeferencing,² GIMP for the image processing, and the GDAL library via QGIS to generate the map tiles, which appear on this site in the form of Leaflet maps using OpenStreetMap as the base. The maps are implemented via the Leaflet Map plugin for WordPress, the open-source platform in which this site is built.

I would love to make the maps available in a globe format such as Google Earth, but that vision is out of reach for now. For starters, the desktop version of Google Earth Pro is no longer available, although it still works if you downloaded it prior to 25 June 2026. The new Google Earth Online portal advertises the capability to share map overlays, but I haven’t had time to figure it out yet. I’d love to find an open-source alternative to Google Earth, but while these apparently exist, I’ve not had time to investigate them. For the moment, if you would like KML versions of the map overlays, get in touch## and I’ll see what I can do.

1. Almost, anyway. Only a few maps yield easily to this process. With most, you have to accept a compromise unless you want to spend the rest of your days adding control points and hitting the render button ‘one last time’.
2. Thankfully I haven’t had to georeference the old maps a second time, but I’ve started georeferencing some new ones using QGIS.