page_title: Original Maryborough Town Site
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Original Maryborough Town Site / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Plaque, Original Maryborough Town Site, 2008
context_page_description: Original Maryborough Town Site is a heritage-listed archaeological site at Russell Street, Maryborough, Fraser Coast Region, Queensland, Australia. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 4 September 2007.
context_section_description: The Original Maryborough Town Site was occupied between 1848 and 1855, and is located about four kilometres northwest of the current city centre, on the southbank of the Mary River. It provides evidence of the early settlement of the Wide Bay district, and is unique amongst the pre-1859 towns of Queensland in that it retains most of its originally occupied town site in an open, relatively undeveloped state. The evocative, peaceful site has the archaeological potential to shed light on life in an early Queensland settlement.
  The free settlement of what later became the colony of Queensland commenced on the Darling Downs in 1840. In 1842, the same year that Moreton Bay was opened to free settlement, Andrew Petrie was commissioned to explore the Wide Bay district. With a group of men that included Henry Stuart Russell, the explorer, pastoralist and historian, Petrie travelled by boat to explore the Mary River (then unnamed) as a possible source of Bunya trees. The explorers travelled about 50 miles (80 km) upstream, and it was concluded that the area would prove suitable for sheep rearing as the river would allow wool to be transported by boat. One of the men, Captain Joliffe, was an employee of the pastoralist and businessman John Eales, who later took up a large run at Tiaro and sent Joliffe there with 16,000 sheep. Although this venture failed, due to a combination of disease, attacks by the traditional owners, and financial problems, other pastoralists soon took up runs in the area. By 1847 more than 20 license applications for runs had been lodged in the region. In July 1847 the government surveyor James Charles Burnett gave encouraging reports of the suitability of what was then known as the Wide Bay River as a location for a port to service the area. The river was then named Mary after Lady Mary Lennox, the wife of Governor Fitzroy.
  Ipswich publican George Furber arrived in the Wide Bay district in September 1847 to set up a wool store, shanty and wharf on the site of an abandoned outstation of Tiaro, named Girkum, in the midst of open forest on the southern bank of the Mary River. The first shipment of wool was dispatched in December 1847. However, the site was on the wrong side of the river for the sheep runs to the west, and in June 1848 Edgar Thomas Aldridge and the Palmer brothers, Richard and Henry, selected a new site on the north bank of the river, just opposite Furber's business. This site was not the best for ship access, but its closeness to Furber's site, and the fact that it was also open forest, offered some security against potential raids by the local Aboriginal people. The spread of the pastoral frontier and its associated violent disruption of traditional Aboriginal lifestyles and land use inevitably caused conflict between traditional owners and settlers. The site of Maryborough was the traditional country of the Badtjala/Butchulla people, while much the Mary River district further upstream was that of the Gubbi Gubbi/Kabi Kabi.
  The Palmers and Aldridge both established inns, along with wool stores and a wharf, and this settlement was known as Wide Bay. The Commissioner for Crown Lands, John Carne Bidwill, arrived in December 1848, and established a camp on a new site nearby on the southern side of the river on the banks of Tinana Creek (now the suburb of Tinana). One of Bidwill's tasks was to find a coastal overland route from Maryborough to Brisbane as an alternative to the then route through Gayndah; however, he died in 1853 without accomplishing this task.
  A post office was established on 23 January 1849, and the settlement then became known as Maryborough. That same year J.C Ricketts built an inn in Maryborough. Furber had also opened a liquor establishment on the north bank of the river by 1850, near the mouth of Muddy Creek, but Aldridge's "Bush Inn" did the best business of the four establishments, and he regularly supplied goods and services to the troopers of the Native Police. The presence of so much alcohol soon led to the establishment of a Court of Petty Sessions, in January 1850, wit
caption: Plaque, Original Maryborough Town Site, 2008
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