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'Mapping Brisbane History' Website is Launched
I attended the launch of the Mapping Brisbane History website over at Cooper Plains on Saturday 1 March, and a very fine afternoon it was too. Among the 40 or so attendees were some of the cream of the...
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Ghost Hunting & Me: Even Atheists Want to go to Heaven
(This was article was written last week. Since then Courier-Mail reporter Des Houghton has published this hard-hitting article titled 'Stop This Sick Sideshow'. He is strongly critical not only of...
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Book of the Month: ‘Intemperance & the Train of Evils: A life on the wrong...
I have been revisiting some of my old publications (for reasons that will become clear in the coming months) and have found that after a few years I can finally look at them with fresh eyes. It's...
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Know Your Colonial Gaol History #8: Saint Helena Island, 1867-1932
St Helena Island mapOvercrowding at Brisbane Gaol on Petrie Terrace in the early 1860s led to the use of the prison hulk ‘Proserpine’ in the Brisbane River. The prisoners held on the hulk travelled to...
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Know Your Colonial Gaol History #9: Maryborough 1877
Maryborough, 1880s.Maryborough probably holds the Queensland record for having the shortest-lived prison, after the police lock-up there became a prison for less than a month in May 1877. It was an...
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Know Your Colonial Gaol History #9: Roma Gaol, 1872-1903
As the colony of Queensland continued to expand after the boom of the 1860s, the reach of British law extended further inland. The Maranoa region of the Western Downs was opened for pastoralists and...
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Know Your Colonial Gaol History #5: Fortitude Valley Police Gaol 1863–1903
The police lockup at Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, can be included in this series as it was officially proclaimed a prison in September 1863, even though it does not appear to have been used as such,...
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Quick Guide to the First Half of the 'Know Your Colonial Gaol History' Series
Think back to some of the truly classic documentary series'. Clark's Civilisation; Bronowski's Ascent of Man; Attenborough's Life on Earth; Sagan's Cosmos; and Burns'The Civil War. Can we now add...
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Know Your Colonial Gaol History #12: The First Townsville Gaol, 1878-96
The prison at Stuart Creek, Townsville was one of Queensland’s major carceral facilities for much of the 20th century and could be regarded as ‘the Boggo Road of the North’, being quite similar in...
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Gallipoli Sunday
There is a faraway place where, towards the end of every April, locals gather in the streets to watch military parades and remember the World War 1 horrors of Gallipoli. The occasion is not known as...
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The Mysterious Case of the 'Ghost of Gallipoli'
Last week on the Boggo Blog Facebook page I made a sneering comment about an article by Fairfax National Affairs editor Tony Wright. In the piece, titled 'Gallipoli 'ghost' captured at soldiers'...
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How many of these ten Historical Misconceptions did you believe?
This month on the Boggo Blog Facebook page I have been looking at some common historical misconceptions. That's not to be a smartypants, because to tell the truth I held quite a lot of them myself....
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The Mysterious Escape of Fingers & Bluey
It was very difficult to escape from Boggo Road’s No.2 Division, thanks to the high red-bricked walls and internal layout. A handful of prisoners did manage to get out of there by various means over...
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Celebrating the Trees of South Brisbane Cemetery, & Killing Their Children
A recent visit to the South Brisbane Cemetery brought something of a major surprise. Council workers had been hard at work and the internal roadways were lined with neatly-stacked piles of freshly-cut...
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Aliens Are Not History: The Credulousness and Despair of our Times
Remember when the History Channel used to be have shows on about History instead of UFOs, ghosts, unicorns, mermaids, or whatever else is popular this week? I can only presume that the channel...
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Know Your Colonial Gaol History #13: The first Boggo Road prison, 1883
HM Prison, Brisbane, 1887. The original cellblock stands in the centre of the prison.At the start of the 1880s there were two prisons in the Brisbane area, one on Petrie Terrace and one on St Helena...
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The 'Lingering Doubts' of Brisbane's 1947 'Arcade Murder'
The murder of Bronia Armstrong in Brisbane in 1947 turned into a double tragedy when Reginald Brown hanged himself in Boggo Road’s F Wing just a few days after being found guilty of the crime. The...
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Know Your Colonial Gaol History #14: The 2nd Rockhampton Gaol 1884-1948
The first Rockhampton prison, built in 1864 on land bordered by South and Murray streets, was in serious disrepair by the late 1870s and had insufficient space for female prisoners, and so a brand new...
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A Damned Good Flogging
Flogging, Darlinghurst Gaol, NSW, 1880s.‘BRING BACK FLOGGING!’ We hear it often enough, and there would be plenty of volunteers to carry them out, but it’s been a very long time since anybody saw one...
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Where Were They From? A 'Where's-Where' of Colonial Queensland Prisoners
Unlike the glossy, spin-manipulated brochures that pass for government department reports today, annual prison reports used to provide frank warts-and-all assessments of the system. Even better, they...
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