FAMILY HISTORY

SOUTH-EAST QUEENSLAND

by Alan Craig

There are three maps on this page: one showing the Brisbane-Ipswich metropolitan areas; a second showing the Brisbane central area as it was in 1890; and the third showing the Gold Coast and its hinterland.

From about 1860, our immediate ancestors started heading from their homelands (Scotland, England, and Prussia) to Brisbane and other areas in South-East Queensland. Robyn’s family were the early immigrants, with her branches of the Ferguson, Hardman, Schroder and Galt families (in that order) making their way here from across the seas to Queensland while it was still just a colony — these families were pioneer settlers in a relatively new land. My side came much later: some of my McKay relatives in the 1920s, and me and my parents in 1950.

This first map shows significant places where our families (including many uncles, aunts and cousins) made their home in and around Brisbane and Ipswich. Our families still celebrate our common heritage as a number of us get together at least once a year — after several hundred years of evolution in Scotland, England, Prussia, Lithuania and Ireland, we now call Brisbane home!

The second map was constructed from a map of Brisbane City made in 1890. It shows where, at that time, the Galt–Ferguson families lived at in the Old Bulimba (now Newstead) area, the Hardman-Young family in the city centre and South Brisbane, and some scattered places where Schroder-Berghofer family members lived after moving here from Caboolture and Charters Towers in the early 1900s.

Robyn’s Ferguson ancestors arrived in Brisbane in 1862, and within a year or so had acquired land in the Cedar Creek area where they worked as timbergetters. Their property was called “Woodhead”, after the place in Old Cumnock where Margaret McKerrow had lived before marrying Walter [2] Ferguson. As the seven children that came to Queensland with Margaret and Walter started to marry, they began to spread to places like the Worongary-Nerang River area, and others north to Maryborough and Gympie. Their son William eventually was left with the property at “Woodhead”, and he passed this on to his son John in 1911.

The Veivers family were another Scottish family that arrived in the district about the same time, and daughter Marion married John Veivers in 1870, and eventually ended up owning the property at “Talgai”, Worongary. The son David had been living at Gilston when he married English immigrant Emma Alice Hardman in 1877; however, this couple were soon living at “Talgai”, where they had their only two children: David Ferguson (1877) and Margaret McKerrow Ferguson (1879) — Margaret was Robyn’s grandmother and married Thomas Barr Galt in 1905.

As a side note, Emma Hardman’s brother Alfred drowned in a boating accident at the south end of Stradbroke Island in 1871 (this was before North Stradbroke and South Stradbroke became separate islands after the demolition of the ship “Cambus Wallace” was followed by severe storms in about 1896).