1825: Major Lockyer leaves Sydney in the Mermaid for Moreton Bay.
1873: Importation of first hares into the Colony (well, that went well)
1885: Formation of the Trades and Labour Council, Brisbane
1887: Heads of Government departments, under pain of suspension, instructed to keep expenditure within estimates (the more things change….)
1825:
Major Edmund Lockyer (1784-1860), of the 57th Regiment, had seen service in the United Kingdom, India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), before arriving in Sydney with his second wife and ten children. The 57th contained quite a few of the celebrated characters of the 1820s, including Captain Patrick Logan, future Commandant of Moreton Bay, and Sudds and Thompson, the two privates whose arrest rocked the Colony and threatened the career of Governor Darling.
However, in August 1825, the Governor was still Sir Thomas Brisbane, and he felt that Major Lockyer was just the chap to explore, chart and describe this Moreton Bay place the fellow Oxley was carrying on about.
Lockyer duly set out on 01 September 1825 in the Mermaid cutter, with John Finnegan, one of the ship-wrecked me who had greeted Oxley with such delight in 1823. Finnegan could prove local detail, especially about that river Oxley had found, and he had lived in good terms with the indigenous people of Moreton Bay and could speak the lingo.
Initially, Lockyer and Finnegan and a couple of soldiers took a small boat away from the Mermaid, which remained in the bay. Finnegan guided Lockyer along the river as he had done with Oxley 18 months earlier. They went 150 miles inland by water, intent of following Brisbane’s command that they study and report on the area. Brisbane’s command is quite alarming to modern readers – study the animals, birds, minerals and natives. In that order.
Lockyer set about surveying and naming things and noticed some coal about Limestone (Ipswich). The interactions the men had with the indigenous people were very benign. The aborigines seemed charmed by these funny men with their pale faces and hair and their bright red uniforms. The feeling was mutual, and the accounts of their meeting make wistful reading.
Conditions at the bar being favourable, Lockyer was able to bring the Mermaid into the river – the first time a sea-going vessel navigated the Brisbane River.
A whirlwind six weeks of sub-tropical surveying later, Lockyer and Finnegan returned to Sydney with a load of northern timber, and a lot of valuable information about the place called Eden Glassie (Brisbane).
Lockyer, Edmund (1784-1860), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 2, Melbourne University Press, 1967.
Lockyer, Nicholas Colston Sir, 1855-1933. Brisbane, Qld, Royal Historical Society of Queensland, 1920. “Exploration by Major Edmund Lockyer of the Brisbane River in 1825,” Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, volume 2, issue 1: pp 54-73.
Illustrations: Wikipedia.
Moreton Bay and More 