Brisbane’s “Frog’s Hollow” district was a low, flood-prone and poorly drained neighbourhood around Albert Street, running from Elizabeth Street to Alice Street and the Botanical Gardens. It remained a famous nuisance throughout the 19th century, defying repeated attempts to fill in and drain the streets.
Stagnant rainwater pooled there and turned a bright algal green, attracting the bullfrogs whose all-night singing gave the area the name. Flimsy houses were built on stumps to avoid inundation and let to people who were too poor and desperate to complain about the stench and the damp. The two catastrophic floods of the 19th century (1864, 1893) destroyed the area.
Vice and disease were said to flourish in Frog’s Hollow, and the Letters page of the Moreton Bay Courier was peppered with respectable citizens’ exhortations for the city to fix the drains and compel the landowners to manage the disposal of household waste and sewerage. A lot of resolutions were announced and carried, but not much happened until the mid-1860s.
By the 1880s, newspapers were confidently referring to the area as “previously known as Frog’s Hollow”, and the worst of the drainage problems seemed to have been conquered. The character of the area was harder to change, if the dramatic lament of The Queensland Figaro of March 15, 1884 “Outcast Brisbane” is anything to go by. The author had encountered a homeless young woman with a new baby, both cold and starving. It appears that the charitable institutions of the town had cast her out because she was unmarried and a mother.
The 1893 flood inundated the area again, but modern curbing and draining was put down, and by the turn of the century, the area was taken over by warehousing and retail. Today, it is a multi-million dollar commercial and residential precinct. A Frog’s Hollow sculpture in the Port Office Building commemorates the area.
http://www.mustdobrisbane.com/visitor-info-arts-culture-history/frogs-hollow-cbd
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