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Chinese riots
- Chinese Riots notes
http://www.multiculturalaustralia.edu.au/doc/evans_anti-chinese_riot.pdf
Anti Chinese Riot: Lower Albert Street by Raymond Evans
If you happen to be dining al fresco today at one of the sidewalk bistros in Albert Street, between Elizabeth and Charlotte, and look directly across the road to the noisy video games amusement parlour, you will be focusing on the spot where this terrible rioting began around 8 o’clock on the evening of 5 May 1888.
All around you on the footpath that night would be a swelling concourse of excited and largely inebriated people, yelling ‘Go the Chinkies!’ and ‘Chinkie go home!’, and hurling large stones and pieces of road metal at the windows of a small Chinese general store, owned by Youen Sing Tai and Ding Chee.
The store was located next to the Royal Exchange Hotel on the corner of Elizabeth and Albert Streets, at the western periphery of a seedy inner-city area, then known as Frog’s Hollow. This was formerly a stretch of swamp land, running along what was to become Albert Street, from Elizabeth to Alice, and spreading outwards to the rising ground along which George and Edward Streets extend.
Newer commercial and industrial enterprises were built upon the partially reclaimed land, interspersed with groups of older residences and boardinghouses in various states of physical decay, constructed upon subsiding foundations and inundated by rot, mildew and damp.
This dilapidated, unsanitary zone was also associated with moral decay, for it was the home of Brisbane’s ‘red-light’ district, with its cluster of brothels in Margaret street, owned by Mary O’Brien and Marie Naylor, as well as Brisbane’s small ‘Chinatown,’ located virtually at the centre of Frog’s Hollow, along Albert and Mary Streets. Here, Chinese shops, residences and boarding houses subsisted alongside gambling rooms, opium parlours, pubs and sly-grog shops.
To these ‘hot-beds of crime and vice’, it was said, ‘prowling gangs of wolf-like larrikins’ were attracted like magnets, mixing with a ‘filthy swarm of cursing slatterns,’ (ie prostitutes) and young blue and white collar workers ‘out on a spree.’ The area was forbidden territory, exciting, dirty and dangerous; and, in any one year, yielded up hundreds of charges of ‘obscene language,’ disorderly conduct and riotous behaviour to the Brisbane Magistrate’s Court, due to the over-policing of its streets. -
Archibald Meston
- Reminiscences by Archibald Meston of Brisbane Creeks, Victoria Bridge and Early Hotels
Another dirty muddy mangrove creek started up near Queen Street, joined by one small branch from where the Commissioner of Police is today, then ran down the present Albert Street to the river at the end of Alice Street. Albert Street was a most unlovely spectacle, the whole area being a muddy mangrove swamp swarming with frogs, whence the name of Frog’s Hollow was derived.
It became in after years one of the most disreputable parts of Brisbane, but those days have gone, and large warehouses stand on the site of “Fairy Maggie’s” establishment and the one storied abodes of many young ladies’ seminaries, whose revelries would have rivaled those of “the Menads round the cup, which Agave yielded up, in the weird Cadmean forest.”
http://www.brisbanehistory.com/Archibald_Meston.html -
Watson Bros Building
- Watson Brothers Building
Watson Brothers' 1887 building was erected during a period of great change in the low-lying, swampy district of inner Brisbane known as Frog's Hollow - the ground between George and Edward Streets, bounded on the west by Elizabeth Street and on the east by Alice Street. The area was farmed by convict labour during the penal settlement of the 1820s and 1830s, and in the 1840s and 1850s was sparsely settled with cottages erected on the higher land. In the busy post-Separation decades of the 1860s and 1870s, an ad hoc process of land filling was undertaken as Frog's Hollow became more densely populated by the working classes, and shophouses, house-workshops, small factories or workshops, boarding houses and hotels were erected. During the boom years of the 1880s, these residences and small workshops were replaced gradually with large and imposing commercial and industrial premises, as Frog's Hollow, conveniently located near the wharves, emerged as Brisbane's principal light-industrial and warehousing precinct. Factories and workshops specialising in clothing, footware, saddlery, furniture, building, printing, brewing, milling, confectionary or biscuit manufacture, coachmaking, ship-fitting and metal-working, as well as substantial importer and manufacturer warehousing, either were established or expanded.
http://www.epa.qld.gov.au/chims/placeDetail.html?siteId=14901 -
Aboriginal Perspective
- Aboriginal Perspective of Flora and Fauna in Brisbane before Settlement
In North Brisbane the largest creek started about the old Grammar School, ran down and formed a waterhole, partly, on the site of the new Town Hall, and ran thence down Adelaide Street, and turned thence across Queen Street, and into the river at the present Creek Street ferry. It was a dirty, muddy, mangrove creek, crossing Queen Street, with an overhead footbridge when I first visited Brisbane, in 1870. In that creek, a brother of Tom Petrie, a splendid young fellow, was drowned, and also one of John Petrie’s children.
Where the fig tree stands today, at the corner of Creek and Elizabeth Streets, there was a waterhole where the boys used to “boogie,” which is a pure aboriginal word for bathing. A small creek ran down Albert Street into the river at the Alice Street ferry, through a most unlovely mangrove swamp known to all the early settlers as “Frogs’ Hollow."
http://www.brisbanehistory.com/before_white_man.html
