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 established rural estates later subdivided into residential allotments.
Queen Street chemist Ambrose Eldridge built the first house in the area on his thirty-acre experimental cotton farm in around 1852. Moreton Bay needed export staples, and for a short while, it seemed Eldridge's Sea Island cotton might provide it. The product did well at the 1855 Paris Exhibition. Eldridge sold Milton Farm to the pastoralist L.E. McDougall so he could buy more land at Eagle Farm. That venture failed, and Eldridge went bankrupt. He was forced back into the pharmacy business.
After McDougall moved back to the Darling Downs, Milton House passed through several hands. Subsequent owners included squatter and politician William Henry Walsh, Police Commissioner David Thompson Seymour, physician Dr Hugh Bell and grain merchant William Siemon.
While the farm was subdivided for residential development in 1855, Milton House still stands. Today, a refurbished structure sits in the middle of a commercial development.
Next door to Milton, Robert Cribb's Dunmore sat on the other side of Dunmore Creek. Both names acknowledged the redoubtable John Dunmore Lang's influence. So do Lang Parade and the recreation reserve that replaced the Paddington cemetery.
Cribb was an estate agent and one of the most distinguished figures in early Queensland's business and political life. One of the leading figures opposing the transportation of convicts to the colony, he was in Sydney to welcome Queensland's first Governor, Sir George Bowen, when he arrived from London. Cribb became a member of the new colony's first and second parliaments.
Cribb's 92-acre (37 hectare) property covered the area between Milton Road and the river, with Dunmore Creek (later Western Creek) at the city end and Auchenflower and Moorlands as the western boundary.
Dunmore House was a riverside landmark, a two-storied wooden house with its red tile roof on River Road (now Coronation Drive). Like Milton House, it was too close to the river when it flooded in 1893.
The best parts of the five-hectare block Brisbane ironmonger John Ward bought on the outbound (river) side of Milton Road in 1876 did not have the same problem.
Ward built a substantial house with views to Mount Coot-tha and the city on the highest ground. Queensland Premier Thomas McIlwraith made major additions when he bought the estate for £2700 in 1880. McIlwraith named it Auchenflower after his family's estate in Ayrshire, Scotland. The name is Gaelic, meaning fertile fields or field of flowers.
The modified structure had a four-metre verandah. A billiard room and a "fine old ballroom, was one of the principal social places of Brisbane, and it was noted for its liberal hospitality" (Historic Auchenflower, Brisbane Courier 21 February 1931)
Visitors who alighted at Auchenflower Station after 1887 could admire "a pretty garden, in which was situated a pond that surrounded a fern island" before making their way up the hill to Auchenflower House.
On the other side of the railway line, overlooking the Toowong reach of the river, John Markwell's Moorlands was a large bungalow residence, surrounded by broad verandas and "a wilderness of flowers and shrubs".
On the northern side of Milton Road, Randall Macdonnell's Rathdonnell House overlooked an estate that extended from Western Creek to modern-day Wienholt Street. Macdonnell was a school inspector who became the first head of Queensland's Educational Department. A subsequent owner added a second storey to the house. The original stables, coach house, and men's quarters became the Auchenflower Presbyterian Church after the estate was subdivided.
Macdonnell's neighbours to the west were pastoralist Edward Wienholt and Queensland Surveyor-General Augustus Gregory. Gregory's homestead at Rainworth gave its name to the immediate locality until it became a locality within Bardon.
Gregory built the nearby Fairseat on the heights of what became Birdwood Terrace for his brother, Francis, who was also an explorer of note.
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 became part of 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:
Denver Beanland, Sir Thomas Mcilwraith: Queensland's Visionary Premier, Queensland History Journal, 2010, Vol.21 No. 1, p.1-15
Helen Gregory, Brisbane Then & Now, Wingfield S.A., Cameron House, 2007
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