Place Names of South-East Queensland

  

 

 

Moorooka

The name is Aboriginal, but there is no evidence to suggest that the local Aboriginal people called the area by this name. However, it is thought to refer to Toohey Mountain which looked like a big nose. One meaning of Moorooka is big nose. It possibly also meant ironbark. But the suburb of Moorooka largely occupies land that was known to the whites in early days at Pegg's Paddock. 

Morayfield

George Raff of Brisbane bought some of the land held by the failed Caboolture Cotton Company and called it Moray Field although it was often writtan as Morayfields. Eventually, from 1881, it became Morayfield. The neighbouring property was owned by the ex-military man, Captain Whish. Morayfield was derived from Raff's native Morayshire in Scotland.

Raff employed kanakas and grew sugar here. The Rev.J.D.Lang commended him on his humane treatment of the islanders. For nearly twenty years rum was produced on the property.

His wife Harriet was the daughter of a retired missionary he met while working in the Gippsland area in the years soon after his migration to Australia in 1839.  After their move to Brisbane in 1851 he became a leading businessman who worked strongly for the separation off of the new colony, Queensland. The house they built at New Farm they called Moraybank and it was the centre for their happy family and social life up until Harriet's death in 1879, but when George married a forty-year-old widow with a family of her own most of his seven sons became somewhat estranged from him. He died in 1889 at the age of 74.  

Moreton Island

The Ngugu who lived on the island prior to the coming of Europeans called it Mulgumpin or something like that. It meant a strange fish.

Lieutenant James Cook, HMS Endeavour, 17 May, 1770, named a shallow bay on the eastern side of the island Moreton Bay and the cape nearby Cape Moreton after James Douglas, Earl of Morton, the Past-President of the Royal Society in England. The present spelling was introduced when John Hawkesworth published the account of Cook's voyage in 1773.

Lord Morton's ownership of the Orkney and Shetland Islands brought him some publicity when it was contested and he was assaulted, but he eventually sold these islands to the north of Scotland. With his wife and child he spent three months in the French Bastille in 1746, However he is best known for his work in astronomy and his promotion of science. He was very much involved in the program to make observations of the transit of the planet Venus which resulted in Cook being sent to Tahiti.

Cook did not realize that the cape was on an island. It was Matthew Flinders who made that discovery in 1799, and he named the island.  John Bingle in the Sally was the first to refer to the large bay on the western side of the island as Morton Bay using Cook's original spelling.  

Morningside

Place names sometimes have their origin in marketing strategies. Moringside is one of these. It was coined in the 1880s for the marketing of a large subdivision as Morningside Estate on the eastern or morning side of the city. It also is the name of a town in Scotland.  

Mothar Mountain

Mothar is said to have been the Aboriginal word for a white man and that they gave it that name because a white man was found there.

Mount Alford

This rural district was named after Thomas Alford, the manager of Coochin Coochin station in the early 1870s.  

Mount Barney

Lieutenant-Colonel George Barney, Royal Engineers, came to the colony of New South Wales in 1835 with his wife and three children, and, except for a short stay back in England, made Australia his home for the rest of his life. At one time he was given the task of setting up a convict settlement in North Australia, but the attempt to do this at Port Curtis was a failure. He held several positions in New South Wales including that of being the Surveyor-General who succeeded Sir Thomas Mitchell.

Captain Logan mistook Mt Barney for Cook's Mt Warning until, 1828, when he climbed it and saw Mt Warning from its slopes. This was on the expedition by Logan, Cunningham and Fraser during which it was named Mt Lindesay. There was a later re-allocation of names to these peaks so that what had been called Lindesay became Barney, and what had at first been called Hooker became Lindesay.  

Mount Beppo

The name is supposed to be derived from the Yuggera language word bippo being their word for mountain. It is not however in the Yuggera language area, but may have been used by an Aboriginal person accompanying one of the early explorers out from the Moreton Bay settlement.



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