Hell ño to the Niño

Judging from the five-day forecast for Brisbane on the first day of September, spring has been cancelled this year, with summer fast-tracked to fill the gap:

Not that it will bother me now that I am back home in West Footscray, enjoying gentle sunshine and maximums below 20 degrees.¹

But whatever horrors El Niño has in store for Brisbane (or Melbourne) in the coming months, it is most definitely spring time for Western Creek. Because in this post it is time to elevate springs — that is, places where water comes out of the ground — to their proper place in the story of this waterway.²

Western Creek, Take 1

To be sure, springs were never absent from my first accounts of Western Creek nearly 15 years ago. There was J. C. Heussler’s petition to the government about a spring in Ellena Street in Rosalie, which met with a reply from A. C. Gregory referring to yet another spring in the area. There was the waterhole that used to be at the bottom of Couldrey Street in Rainworth, which I speculated might have been a spring, or at least spring-fed. And there has always been the question of how, in the absence of springs, Western Creek could have led John Oxley to wax lyrical about a chain of ponds offering an abundance of water in a dry September in 1824.

But I didn’t know enough back then about springs or geology to offer anything more than vague speculations. Apart from what I could see on old maps or read in old newspapers, my account of Western Creek was quite literally constrained by a surface-level understanding of how water drained through the landscape.

If only I’d had an expert in how water moves through the ground to help me, I might have been able to say something more definitive.

Once more, from the top

During my recent visit to Brisbane, I was lucky enough to explore Western Creek again with just such an expert. This particular expert — let’s call him a hydrogeologist — happens to be one of the reasons why this website has been revived. Ned Hamer contacted me back in May to invite me to collaborate on a project he’d initiated about Brisbane’s historic springs, of which it turns out there are many.³ The story of these springs is important, for without them the settlement of Brisbane may not have worked out the way it did.

The rumoured springs of Western Creek are part of that story, so Ned was keen to investigate first-hand to see if he could find any evidence for them. What he found has turned my understanding of Western Creek upside down, and cast new light on old mysteries.

Let’s start at the Couldrey Street clearing, since the anecdotes about a waterhole being here up until the 1970s was one of the starting points for this investigation, along with the seemingly permanent pond just downstream at the bottom of the gully just above Haining Street. If you head into the bush reserve above this clearing, you will find natural creek channels like the one below. Unless there has been decent rain, these channels will be dry.

If you fight your way upstream to the north-west through the weeds and over the big water pipe (or just be sensible and enter from Tristania Drive instead), you’ll find that the ground starts to get boggy. The bog deepens into ponds, and the ponds give way to a small stream.

Here’s a short video of the stream so you can see that it is really moving. Remember that this was captured months after any substantial rain.

Before long, the stream disappears beneath the culvert under Tristania Drive near where it joins Tipuana Place.

Scramble up to the road and down the embankment on the other side, and you will find yourself in a grove of palm trees, many of which are growing out of this bright red stream. It’s like a little rainforest oasis if you ignore the weeds, abandoned car tyres and broken bottles.

At the top of this oasis is a large pond and a drainpipe that disappears under a backyard on Tipuana Drive. We can’t see any more of the stream, but somewhere between here and Stuartholme School towering far above us, something special is happening.

Draining, fast and slow

As you have probably already guessed, what we are looking at here is a spring — a place where water flows out of the ground and onto the land. Springs are magical because they present us with water without providing any clue about where it came from. The best most of us can do is guess.

A hydrogeologist like Ned can do better than guess, although some guesswork is usually still required without the luxury of extensive drilling, sampling and testing. Inferring the source of spring water ultimately boils down to knowing what kind of rocks are under the ground and how the rock properties influence the chemistry, storage and flow of water.

Near a stream, and especially in a flood-prone area, the subsurface is likely to consist of unconsolidated sand, gravel and silt known as alluvium. Where a stream (or a hole that someone has dug) cuts into the saturated part of the alluvium — commonly known as the water table — we see permanent or long-lasting ponds. The old waterhole at the bottom of Couldrey Street was probably an example, as is the pond at the bottom of Government House and Norman Buchan Park.

Beneath the alluvium is the bedrock — a solid layer that also extends outwards and upwards into the hills. This might be made of relatively soft and porous rock like sandstone, or hard and impermeable rock like the Bunya Phyllite that underlies much of western Brisbane, including the upper reaches of Western Creek.

In the hills of suburbs like Bardon, Paddington and Red Hill, you can find outcrops of Bunya Phyllite in road cuttings like the one below on Stuartholme Road.

This is hard rock for sure, but if you look closely you will see that it is full of cracks and fractures. These allow water to flow slowly through the rock, turning an otherwise impermeable layer into an aquifer. While the cracks may look small, they can store a surprising amount of water.

If a ‘downstream’ part of the rock finds an opening to the surface — for example, at the bottom of a steep hill like the one leading up to Stuartholme — the water at the bottom will be pushed out by the cumulative weight of the water above, and we have ourselves a spring. And because the water drains through the rock much more slowly than it moves over the surface or through the alluvium, the spring keeps flowing even when other parts of the land have dried up.

This mechanism explains the rust-stained stream that we see in the palm-lined grove above Tristania Drive, with one notable gap. We can’t actually see where the fractured, saturated rock meets the surface. All we can see is water coming out of a drain pipe. So how does the spring water get into the drain?

A pipe is just another rock

Stormwater drains are built to carry water as efficiently as possible to the nearest creek or river. Like the creeks they replace, drains follow the lowest points in the landscape, so we can expect any nearby water to find them. This includes water that has found its way out of a fractured rock aquifer and into the soil. As Ned explained to me, the infilled channel around a drain pipe or culvert can be be a very attractive pathway for underground water, especially if the channel has been cut through a layer of fractured rock.

Just like the rocks around them, drain pipes and culverts can be riddled with flow pathways in the form of cracks or joins. Water from the surrounding channel can seep through these cracks and hitch an express ride down the catchment.

This nexus between springs and drains means that our best chance of seeing evidence for springs in an urban setting is by looking through the inlets of stormwater drains. A dramatic example can be found about a kilometre downstream of Tristania Drive at the top of Norman Buchan Park. This is where the water from the Stuartholme subcatchment joins the water draining from the other valleys between Birdwood Terrace and the ridge above Hebe Street on the other side of Boundary Road. (See this post for a more detailed look at these subcatchments.) When I first surveyed the creek back in 2011, there was a concrete slab covering the drain here, but nowadays there is a large metal grate that allows you to see the pipes.

Even though no meaningful rain had fallen for a long time before I captured this video, there were steady flows from all four of these pipes, albeit more in some than in others. The three pipes on the left most likely drain the valleys between Birdwood Terrace and Boundary Road, while the fourth appears to lead towards the valley around Gerler Street on the other side of Boundary Road. Although you can’t see it in this video, the fourth drain was running at least as fast as any of the others, which raises the prospect of a spring in that valley as well, perhaps helped by the large amount of unsealed ground around the scout den on Bee Street.

The little stream that could

When I first got my head around Western Creek nearly 15 years ago, I imagined a network of streams that were dry most of the time except in the low-lying area between Rosalie and the river, known from the early days of settlement as Red Jacket Swamp. Anecdotes such as the lost waterhole at Couldrey Street, and surviving features like the pond just above Haining Street, made me wonder if the real picture was more complicated; but my limited understanding of hydrology and geology meant that I couldn’t fill in the details.

Thanks to my recent site visit and Ned’s Springology 101 crash course, I can see that Western Creek might have been dotted with little oases and chains of ponds all the way up to the top of the catchment. Despite draining a small catchment and being surrounded by supposedly barren hills, this humble stream may have punched above its weight in terms of the biodiversity and human activity it supported.

Besides changing our picture of what Western Creek may have once looked like, this knowledge can change how we see Western Creek today. For starters, it elevates the importance of the remnant patches of bush around Tristania Drive, and especially the smaller patch on the upstream side (marked on Google Maps as Tristania Drive Park).⁴ Even though the true head of the spring is hidden somewhere under the houses along Tipuana Place, the stream running out of the pipe and through the palm grove must be one of very few remaining examples of a running spring in a natural setting this close to the Brisbane CBD.⁵

Looking towards the future, the spring-supplemented flows of Western Creek mean that any restoration efforts that we care to make, for example by surfacing the stream in Rainworth Park, Norman Buchan Park or the Governor’s property, could yield especially rewarding results.

El Niño’s silver lining?

The funny thing about seeing Western Creek’s spring over the last couple of weeks is that had trodden this ground many times before, but until now I could not see what was before my eyes.

I even photographed the spring in my early surveys of the creek in October 2011:

To be fair, even if I had known what to look for on those occasions, the springyness of this stream might not have been as clear as in recent visits. Rainfall data available from the Bureau of Meteorology shows that there were significant falls on or before the days I took these photographs, whereas much less had fallen before my visits in August 2026. Nearly all of the channels in the reserve were flowing back in October 2011, and those near the spring were not vividly red like they were in August 2026, presumably because the iron-stained soil in the streambed had been flushed out.

This comparison shows that timing is important when studying a spring, since recent rainfall can complicate the picture. The good news for those of you in Brisbane who are facing a long and brutal summer thanks to the coming super El Niño is that you will have an excellent opportunity to study the persistence of the Stuartholme spring amid hot, dry conditions. I look forward to your reports!

1. Yes, I did actually move from Brisbane to Melbourne partly for the weather!
2. Fathers Day is also coming, so you can take this tortured pun as my offering of a dad-joke.
3. Also on the project team are Professor Rod Fensham and Dr Jennifer Silcock from the School of Environment at the University of Queensland. I’d like to extend a huge thank you to Ned for the guided tour of ground that I thought I knew well, and to the whole team for changing my outlook on springs and waterways in Western Creek and beyond. I look forward to sharing more about the project in the coming months.
4. Equally important is the open land upstream, whether in backyards, remnant bush, or perhaps even Stuatholme’s playing field, that allows rain to seep down the rocks that supply the spring.
5. Another notable example is in Victoria Park / Barrambin, which sadly is now jeopardised by the Olympic Stadium development.