The inner riverside suburb of Auchenflower is 3.5 kilometres west of Brisbane's CBD on Milton Road.
Hilltop Aboriginal campsites in the area exploited the wetlands along the Brisbane River, including areas now occupied by parkland: Moorlands Park, Dunmore Park and Gregory Park beside Milton State School, formerly Red Jacket Swamp. The sites served as temporary accommodations for indigenous groups travelling along the Brisbane River to gathering points in the Brisbane CBD.
The area was surveyed and settled in the 1850s when business figures, including Ambrose Eldridge and Robert Cribb, established rural estates that were later subdivided into residential allotments. Eldridge's Milton House is still standing; Cribb's Dunmore was on River Road (now Coronation Drive) near Lang Parade. Both were too close to the river when it flooded in 1893.
Brisbane ironmonger John Ward bought a block stretching from the river bank to Milton Road. He built a substantial house with views to Mount Coot-tha and the city on the highest ground. After he sold the estate to Queensland Premier Thomas McIlwraith in 1880, McIlwraith named it Auchenflower, after his family's estate in Ayrshire, Scotland. The name is Gaelic, meaning field of flowers.
Other estates in the area included Augustus Gregory's Fairseat, which lay just west of Randall MacDonnell's Rathdonnell and the Mayne family's Moorlands.
Meanwhile, blocks along what became Milton Road beyond the Paddington Cemetry (later, Lang Park) were being subdivided into 16 to 32 perch house allotments by the time Auchenflower railway station opened in 1887. Milton and Toowong received stations when the line to Ipswich opened in 1875. Auchenflower's station may have opened to suit McIlwraith and those who visited him on his semi-rural estate, but suburban housing development was already underway.
Although a small shopping centre developed around Milton Road and Munro Street intersection, Milton and Toowong remained the main village centres.
While Toowong's State School opened in 1879, and Milton's followed in 1889, Auchenflower's educational establishments were limited to an Infants' School (1922-1960).
McIlwraith's Auchenflower House passed through several owners after he returned to Scotland in 1895. The estate around the house was subdivided in 1903, just before the electric tram line along Milton Road began operations. Over the next decade, around seven hundred allotments in various estates turned Auchenflower into a commuter suburb. However, there was still some vacant land with dairy agistments along River Road (Coronation Drive).
McIlwraith's former residence, Auchenflower House, passed into the hands of prominent lawyer and Labor politician T. J. Ryan. After Ryan's premature death in 1921, his widow sold the property, which occupied half of the suburban block, to the Catholic Church. It became a Carmelite nunnery in 1927.
Forty years later, the site was cleared, and the Holy Spirit Catholic Church replaced the cloistered nunnery. While most of the house was demolished, the ballroom and billiard room were rebuilt at Early Street Historical Village in Norman Park. The building was relocated to the Tamborine Estate Winery in the Beaudesert Shire in the 1990s.
The suburb suffered severely in the 1893 floods, when the waters rose over the railway lines, and again in 1974. Flood-mitigation measures implemented upstream on the Brisbane River could not prevent the suburb's lower areas from going under again in 2011. The reiver's old streambed tributaries inundated Moorlands Park, Dunmore Park and adjacent parts of Milton and Rosalie.
Sources:
Historic Auchenflower, Brisbane Courier 21 February 1931, p. 19 (Source: Trove: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/21671601)
Ray Kerkhove, Aboriginal camp sites of greater Brisbane: an historical guide, Salisbury, Booralong Press, 2015
John Pearn, Auchenflower: The Suburb and the Name: A History of Auchenflower, Brisbane, Australia, Brisbane, Amphion Press/Department of Child Health, 1997
J. H. Pearn, Auchenflower: The Suburb and Its Name, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, Vol. 17, No. 2, May 1999: 92-96
Queensland Places (Enter Auchenflower in the search window.)
T.C. Truman, Rewriting the History of the Birth of Brisbane, Courier Mail, 29 April 1950
Angus Veitch, From Red Jacket Swamp to Rosalie's playground: The story of Gregory Park, There Once Was A Creek.
Diana Woodhouse, Fragments from an Auchenflower life, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, Vol.16 No. 9 February 1998