Maryborough
Located on the Bruce Highway in Batjala country in the Fraser Coast Region, approximately 255 kilometres north of Brisbane, Maryborough takes its name from the Mary River, which flows into the Great Sandy Strait between the mainland and Fraser Island/K'gari thirty-seven kilometres downstream from the city. The river was named after Mary Lennox, wife of New South Wales Governor Charles Augustus Fitzroy.
Early European visitors to the region included Matthew Flinders (1802) and William Edwardson (1822), who surveyed the Hervey Bay coastline, the castaway Richard Parsons and escaped convicts John Graham and James Davis (Duramboi). Andrew Petrie and Henry Stuart Russell sailed up the river in 1842 looking for land and stands of timber to exploit. Pastoralists who followed soon afterwards, travelling overland from the Darling Downs, encountered fierce resistance, with shepherds and livestock killed and early settlers forced to withdraw from the area.
After Commissioner of Crown Lands Stephen Simpson visited the area and suggested that the junction of the Mary River and Tinana Creek would be a suitable location for a township, settlers began to return to the area, and Maryborough was founded when George Furber established a wool depot on the banks of the river in 1847. Other buildings followed, and within three years, the settlement had several permanent buildings, a post office, a court of petty sessions and police station, a boiling down facility and a boatyard. The government surveyor H.H. Labatt laid out the site for the township in 1850, with the first land sales in January 1852.
While Maryborough's economy was initially centred around livestock farming, timber-getting, and boiling animal carcasses to make tallow, sugarcane was introduced to the area in the late 1850s. Many local landholders switched to growing cane, and the first sugar mill commenced operations in 1867.
Maryborough was proclaimed a municipality in 1861 and became a significant port of entry for immigrants arriving in Queensland. The city's status as a substantial port handling wool, meat, timber, sugar, and other rural products with international connections caused Australia's only outbreak of pneumonic plague in 1905, the year the municipality became a city. A wharf labourer took sacking from a freighter that had arrived from Hong Kong, where the disease was rampant home for his children to sleep on. After five of his seven children, two nurses, and a neighbour died from the disease, health officials burnt the family's house to the ground.
