Brisbane

Brisbane, port, capital of Queensland, Australia, and the country’s third largest city. It lies astride the Brisbane River on the southern slopes of the Taylor Range, 12 miles (19 km) above the river’s mouth at Moreton Bay.

The site, first explored in 1823 by John Oxley, was occupied in 1824 by a penal colony, which had moved from Redcliffe (22 miles [35 km] northeast). The early name, Edenglassie, was changed to honour Sir Thomas Makdougall Brisbane, governor of New South Wales (1821–25), when the convict settlement was declared a town in 1834. Officially, freemen could not settle within 50 miles (80 km) of the colony until its penal function was abandoned in 1839, but this ban proved ineffective. A short-lived rivalry for eminence with the town of Cleveland was ended when the latter’s wharves burned in 1854, allowing Brisbane to become the leading port. Proclaimed a municipality in 1859, it became the capital of newly independent Queensland that same year. Gazetted a city in 1902, it was joined during the 1920s with South Brisbane to form the City of Greater Brisbane. Its municipal government, headed by a lord mayor, holds very broad powers. The Brisbane statistical division, including the cities of Ipswich and Redcliffe, has close economic and social ties to the city.

Brisbane is the hub of many rail lines and highways, which bring produce from a vast agricultural hinterland stretching west to the Eastern Highlands, the Darling Downs, and beyond. The city’s port, which can accommodate ships of 34,000 tons, exports wool, grains, dairy products, meat, sugar, preserved foods, and mineral sands. The metropolitan area, also industrialized, with more than half of the state’s manufacturing capacity, has heavy and light engineering works, food-processing plants, shipyards, oil refineries, sawmills, and factories producing rubber goods, automobiles, cement, and fertilizer. Oil is piped from wells at Moonie (west) and at Roma (northwest), which also supplies natural gas. Water is supplied from Lake Manchester, the Mount Crosby Weir, and the Somerset Dam. The city, the halves of which are connected by several bridges and ferries, is the site of the University of Queensland at St. Lucia (1909), Griffith University (1971), Parliament House (1869), the state museum (1855) and art gallery (1895), Anglican and Roman Catholic cathedrals, and many parks and gardens. In January 2011, after a prolonged period of heavy rain, the Brisbane River overflowed its banks and caused the city’s worst flood since 1974. Pop. (2001) local government area, 873,780; Brisbane Statistical Division, 1,627,535; (2006) local government area, 956,129; Brisbane Statistical Division, 1,763,131.