The history of Queensland encompasses both a long Aboriginal Australian presence as well as the more recent periods of European colonisation and as a state of Australia.A History of Queensland by Raymond Evans, Cambridge University Press, 2007 () Before being charted and claimed for the Kingdom of Great Britain by Lieutenant James Cook in 1770, the coast of north-eastern Australia was explored by Dutch and French navigators. Queensland separated from the Colony of New South Wales as a self-governing Crown colony in 1859. In 1901 it became one of the six founding states of Australia.
Indigenous people Established theories estimate that between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago, humans first arrived in Australia – although some theories suggest this figure to be much higher.The Canberra Times, 20 Oct 1985, p.20 "Looking Through The Windows Of History"https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/132372761 They are thought to have arrived either by boat or by land bridge. The most likely route was from Southeast Asia across the Torres Strait. During the initial ten thousand years, these people and their descendants are thought to have traveled over much of the continent.
Around 25,000 years ago, the ice age began with a rapid drop in the temperature of the Earth of eight degrees. Food was difficult to find and this led to the origin of seed-grinding technology. This climate change is estimated to have lasted for over 10,000 years. As the temperature rose, the land bridges from Southeast Asia to Tasmania were reclaimed by the sea.
About 15,000 years ago, global temperatures warmed and rainfall increased along the eastern coast of Australia. The inland of Queensland, also receiving rainfall, again became habitable. Coastal lands decreased due to rising sea levels and tropical rain forests spread. The Kalkadoon people of the inland central gulf region dug wells 10m deep to maintain their supply of freshwater.
From 10,000 years until European arrival, despite the favourable warmer climate, humans were unable to develop either agriculture or animal husbandry due to the lack of domesticable cereal plants or suitable animals. When James Cook explored and charted the east coast of Australia in 1770–1772 he was able to navigate close to shore in shallow water as HMB Endeavour was flat-bottomed, so he and the other scientists on board had plenty of time to examine the land through telescopes whilst depths were taken every few metres for the charts, but they reported they saw no evidence of either agriculture or permanent structures, which caused them to believe the people were nomads and therefore the land was "Terra Nullius" or without owners.
The peak Indigenous population in Queensland prior to European arrival is uncertain. The number may have been between 200,000 and 500,000 people. Numbers may have decreased at times of epidemics like smallpox. Rough calculations of the population can be made from the knowledge that Queensland supported 34.2 per cent of the total number of tribes in Australia and from the knowledge that 35 to 39 per cent of Australian indigenous people lived in Queensland.Ørsted-Jensen, Robert: Frontier History Revisited, Brisbane 2011, p9-15. Queensland was the most densely populated region of the continent with two of the six to seven hundred Indigenous nations and at least ninety language groups.
European exploration In 1606, the Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon landed near the site of the modern-day town of Weipa on the western shore of Cape York. His arrival was the first recorded encounter between European and Australian Aboriginal people.
In 1606, Luis Váez de Torres, a Spanish explorer may have sighted the Queensland coast at the tip of Cape York. In that year, he had sailed the Torres Strait, the body of water now named after him.
In 1768, the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville sailed west from the New Hebrides islands, getting to within a hundred miles of the Queensland coast. He did not reach the coast because he did not find a passage through the coral reefs, and turned back.
Lieutenant James Cook wrote that he claimed the east coast for King George III of the Kingdom of Great Britain on 22 August 1770 when standing on Possession Island off the west coast of Cape York Peninsula, naming eastern Australia "New South Wales".European discovery and the colonisation of Australia culture.gov.au This included the present Queensland. Cook charted the Australian east coast in his ship HM Barque Endeavour, naming Stradbroke and Morton (now Moreton Island) islands, the Glass House Mountains, Double Island Point, Wide Bay, Hervey Bay and the Great Sandy Cape, now called Fraser Island. His second landfall in Australia was at Round Hill Head, north of Brisbane. Endeavour was grounded on a coral reef near Cape Tribulation, on 11 June 1770 where he was delayed for almost seven weeks while they repaired the ship. This occurred where Cooktown now lies, on the Endeavour River, both places named after the incident. On 22 August Endeavour reached the northern tip of Queensland, which Cook named the Cape York Peninsula after the Duke of York.
In 1799, in Norfolk, Matthew Flinders spent six weeks exploring the Queensland coast as far north as Hervey Bay. In 1802 he explored the coast again. On a later trip to England, his ship HMS Porpoise and the accompanying Cato ran aground on a coral reef off the Queensland coast. Flinders set off for Sydney in an open cutter, at a distance of , where the Governor sent ships back to rescue the crew from Wreck Reef.
19th century exploration and settlement
In 1823, John Oxley sailed north from Sydney to inspect Port Curtis (now Gladstone) and Moreton Bay as possible sites for a penal colony. At Moreton Bay, he found the Brisbane River whose existence Cook had predicted and proceeded to explore the lower part of it. In September 1824, he returned with soldiers and established a temporary settlement at Redcliffe. On 2 December, the Moreton Bay penal settlement was transferred to where the Central Business District (CBD) of Brisbane now stands. The settlement was initially called Edenglassie, a portmanteau of the Scottish towns Edinburgh and Glasgow. Major Edmund Lockyer discovered outcrops of coal along the banks of the upper Brisbane River in 1825. In 1839, transportation of convicts ceased, culminating in the closure of the Brisbane penal settlement. In 1842, a free settlement was permitted. In the same year, Andrew Petrie reported favourable grazing conditions and decent forests to the north of Brisbane, which led shortly to the arrival of settlers to Fraser Island and the Cooloola coast region.
In 1847, the Port of Maryborough was opened as a wool port. The first immigrant ship to arrive in Moreton Bay was the Artemisia in 1848. In 1857, Queensland's first lighthouse was built at Cape Moreton.
Frontier war
Fighting between Aboriginals and settlers in colonial Queensland was more bloody than in any other colonial state in Australia, perhaps partly due to Queensland having a larger pre-contact indigenous population than any other colony in Australia, accounting for over one third, and in some estimates close to forty percent, of the entire pre-contact population of the continent. The latest and hitherto most comprehensive survey estimates that some 1,500 European settlers – and their Chinese, Aboriginal and Melanesian allies – died in frontier skirmishes with Aboriginals in Queensland during the nineteenth century. The same study indicates that the number of casualties Aboriginal people suffered in these battles with settlers and native police (frequently described by contemporary political leaders and newspapers as "warfare", "a kind of warfare", "guerrilla-like warfare", and at times as a "war of extermination") is highly likely to have exceeded 30,000. (That is a tripling of the hitherto used minimum estimates for Queensland.)Ørsted-Jensen, Robert: Frontier History Revisited: – Colonial Queensland and the 'History War, Brisbane 2011; Evans, Raymond: The country has another past: Queensland and the History Wars, in Passionate Histories: Myth, memory and Indigenous Australia Aboriginal History Monograph 21, September 2010 (Edited by Frances Peters-Little, Ann Curthoys and John Docker).; Queenslander 1 May 1880 & Brisbane Courier, 8 May 1880, p. 2e-f, editorial; The Way We Civilise; Black and White; The Native Police: – A series of articles and letters Reprinted from the 'Queenslander' (Brisbane, December 1880); Rusden: History of Australia Vol 3 pp. 146–56 & 235 Yet even this figure is liable to increase if the results of the first attempt to use extensive primary sources to calculate the Aboriginal casualties due to violence on the Queensland frontier in this period is used. A paper prepared by Raymond Evans and Robert Ørsted-Jensen for the annual AHA conference at the University of Queensland on 9 July 2014 indicated that a minimum figure of 65,000 Aboriginal casualties is a more realistic figure. The "Native Police Force" (sometimes "Native Mounted Police Force"), recruited and deployed by the Queensland government, was allegedly involved in the oppression, dispossession and murder of indigenous people during this period.
The three largest massacres of whites by Aboriginals in Australian colonial history all took place in Queensland. On 27 October 1857 Martha Fraser's Hornet Bank station on the Dawson River, in central Queensland took the lives of 11 Europeans.; NSWV&P re 26 October 1857; MBC 14 Nov 1857. Book: Reid, Gordon: A Nest of Hornets: The Massacre of the Fraser family at Hornet Bank Station, Central Queensland, 1857, and related events, Melbourne 1982. The tent camp of the embryo station of Cullin-La-Ringo near Springsure was attacked by Aboriginals on 17 October 1861, killing 19 people including the grazier Horatio Wills.Queensland State Archive re 11 November 1861 – COL/R2/61/893; 12 Nov 1861 – COL/R2/61/894; 30 October 1861 – COL/A22/61/2790; Rockhampton Bulletin 29 Oct 1861; Brisbane Courier 5 Nov 1861, p2d. Brisbane Courier 9 Nov 1861, p2c-d; Brisbane Courier 11 Nov 1861, p2g-3a; Brisbane Courier 9 Dec 1861, p3c-d Book: Reid, Gordon: A Nest of Hornets: The Massacre of the Fraser family at Hornet Bank Station, Central Queensland, 1857, and related events, Melbourne 1982. Following the wreck of the brig Maria at Bramble Reef near the Whitsunday Islands, on 26 February 1872, a total of 14 European survivors were massacred by local Aboriginals.Sydney Morning Herald 7 March 1872; Sydney Morning Herald 11 Mar 1872; Port Denison Times 28 Mar 1872; Brisbane Courier 4/4/72; Queensland State Archive COL/A172/72/1812; Queenslander 6 Apr 1872, p9; Sydney Morning Herald 2 Feb 1874, p3e-f. The Battle of One Tree Hill and Darkey Flat Massacre also took place in the 1840s.
Separation from New South Wales
In 1851, a public meeting was held to consider Queensland's separation from New South Wales. On 6 June 1859 Queen Victoria signed letters patent to form the colony of Queensland. A proclamation was read by George Bowen on 10 December 1859 whereupon Queensland was formally separated from New South Wales. Bowen became the first Governor of Queensland and Robert Herbert became the first Premier of Queensland. The young colony was keen to fill its treasury. Seeing the gold rushes and their effects in Victoria and New South Wales, the government of Queensland offered significant rewards to anyone discovering payable gold deposits.
Queensland was the only Australian colony that commenced immediately with its own parliament (responsible government), instead of first spending time with a governor appointed by The Crown. By this time, Western Australia was the only Australian colony without a responsible government. Ipswich and Rockhampton became towns in 1860, with Maryborough and Warwick becoming towns the following year.