Brisbane
Queensland's capital, Brisbane, takes its name from the river John Oxley named after Sir Thomas Brisbane, the sixth governor of New South Wales. Brisbane's surname derives from the Scottish Gaelic bris ('to break or smash') and the Old English ban ('bone').
The city's central business district, on a peninsula about fifteen kilometres from the river's mouth, was known to the Turrbal people as Meanjin ('place shaped as a spike' or possibly 'the place of the blue water lilies'). The Yagara word Magandjin, which sounds similar, refers to the tulipwood tree.
When Moreton Bay penal settlement, initially founded at Redcliffe, was relocated to North Quay on the banks of the Brisbane River, New South Wales Chief Justice Forbes suggested Edenglassie as the name for the new settlement, though the settlement was generally referred to as Moreton Bay. It became Brisbane when the convict settlement was declared a town in 1834, although free settlers could not establish themselves within eighty kilometres of the penal settlement until the convict era was drawing to a close. Through Brisbane's convict era, the settlement acquired a reputation for harsh treatment of hardened criminals who had committed further offences after their arrival in New South Wales.
Once the convicts were gone, a three-way tussle for dominance saw Brisbane emerge as the region's capital and port, to the chagrin of the Darling Downs squatters, who preferred Ipswich as the capital and Cleveland, on the shores of Moreton Bay, as the port.
