With a view to making their fortunes, Matthew Brown Orr and James Honeyman arrived in Moreton Bay from Scotland on the Helenslee on 6 August 1862. To create an address for their enterprise they chose Queen’s Wharf, specifically allotment no. 5 which they purchased from its first owner, Thomas Dowse, sometime in 1863.

According to a newspaper advertisement from the following decade, Orr and Honeyman paid £2,000 for the site. They then invested £4,000 in improvements such as a brick and stone building containing offices and a counting house, two stores, one with a substantial stone basement, a package store, a wharf, a storeman’s cottage and a three bay stable. Their office on William Street had been designed by architect Benjamin Backhouse, a prolific architect resident in Brisbane between 1861 and 1868, with ‘ample provisions for additions at the northern side’.

To carry people and goods between Brisbane and outlying rural settlements to the south, Orr and Honeyman purchased the steamer Amy. Having been disassembled in Scotland, following its arrival by sailing ship the Amy was rebuilt on the riverbank below Queen’s Wharf during 1863. Following a celebratory launch she undertook trips to Ipswich, later servicing the Logan River where a village had been surveyed near the Jimboomba pastoral run in 1865.

Next, Orr and Honeyman bought riverside land at Logan Village, another vessel, the Leonie in 1865 and the Malungmavel Plantation at the junction of the Pimpama River and Hotham Creek, where cotton, then sugar and later arrowroot was grown. The expansion is reflected in mortgages, granted to members of the Orr and Brown families in Scotland in 1865 and Brisbane property speculator James Gibbon in 1868, included in land title dealing documents for the Queen’s Wharf site.

In March 1870 an event the Brisbane Courier claimed was ‘unparalleled in the meteorological history of Brisbane, and so great a rainfall in so short a period has never before been recorded’ submerged Orr and Honeyman’s wharf and resulted in water a metre deep in the lower storey of their No. 1 store nearest the river. Misfortunes continued.  In 1871 the Orr and Honeyman partnership reported assets of £28,000 but liabilities of £30,000 to a meeting of creditors and went into liquidation. James Gibbon subsequently transferred the mortgage of the Queen’s Wharf site, allotment no. 5, to sawmiller William Pettigrew.

Following the sale of partnership assets, Matthew Brown Orr purchased land at Tamrookum, south west of Beaudesert in the Upper Logan. It is from this property that the Orr family and one servant returned to England in September 1880. James Honeyman remained in Brisbane, as agent for the London and Lancashire Insurance Company, until 1876. Through the business Honeyman and Sons, his name is linked with the steamers Louisa (until 1887) and Fanny. James Honeyman, resident of Cleveland, retired from the position of Inspector of Invoices in the Customs Department in 1904.

Additional Reading

• Brisbane Courier, 10 March 1870, p. 2.
• Brisbane Courier, 1 November 1871, p. 4.

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In the early years of the twentieth century a power generating station was constructed at the corner of William and Margaret Streets, where Pettigrew’s Sawmill had once been. Constructed by the City Electric Light Company Limited, this station provided power to the city until larger stations such as that at Bulimba took over.

Brisbane’s first power electric power was generated by Barton White & Co. in 1888 to supply the General Post Office in Queen Street. Edward G. C. Barton had earlier been involved in completing the installation of electric lighting equipment in the Government Printing Office and Parliamentary buildings. When the partnership of Barton White & Co was dissolved in 1896, Barton formed the Brisbane Electric Supply Company and opened a new power house at 69 Ann Street. To allow for expansion in what was a growth industry, a new company named the City Electric Light Company Limited was formed in 1904 and commenced construction of its William Street power house from around 1910.

Large extensions were made to the plant in 1920 through the addition of a second turbine, cooling water for which was pumped from the Brisbane River. Burning 2.5 tons of coal per hour to generate over 6 million candle power, it is little wonder that complaints from nearby residents about smoke and dust increased and CEL was taken to court for creating a nuisance.

Inevitably the infrastructure for the generation of electric power moved away from the city centre. CEL opened another power house, later referred to as Bulimba A, in 1926. In 1930 the William Street generator, weighing over 60 tons was moved downhill to the river where it was transported, by raft, to this newer generating station. In time the William Street power house was decommissioned.

Additional Reading

• Egeherg, HF. ‘The Development of electricity supply in Queensland‘ in the Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, volume 6, no. 1, pp. 60-72.
• Thomis, Malcolm I. A history of the electricity supply industry in Queensland. Brisbane: Boolarong, 1987.

Acknowledgement

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The history of the Queen’s Wharf precinct is linked to infrastructure, industry and transport rather than residential development, a matter clearly shown in the location in 1890, slightly upstream of Queen’s Wharf, of the Sanitation Depot.

In the years before Brisbane was sewered, what to do with the waste collected in earth closets (often referred to as ‘nightsoil’) was a serious problem confronting the municipal authority. Until the 1880s rates of mortality, especially infant mortality, remained high, in part due to unhygienic conditions and the haphazard methods of dealing with nightsoil.

From the 1870s, under regulations of the Brisbane Municipal Council, nightsoil was transported to a depot just north of the city boundary along Kelvin Grove Road. Nearby residence complained. Eventually the Brisbane Council elected to dispose of noxious wastes at sea.

Accordingly, in September 1889, Council called for tenders for the construction of a wharf and sheds between the Morgue and Queen’s Wharf for use in connection with the shipment of nightsoil. A five year contract was signed with the Brisbane Sanitary Company. Carters brought the nightsoil from around the city to the wharf where it was loaded onto the Walker (Maryborough) built steamer, Pacific, for removal downriver and out into Moreton Bay where it was dispersed.

The building was barely operational when in January 1890 a landslip relocated the sheds to the river, with the end of the wharf raised three metres above the water. Many of the contractor’s stored pans and lids were lost downstream.

The Sanitation Depot was rebuild and continued to serve the needs of the city until sewerage was introduced in the 1920s. The Sanitation Depot shed was removed from Queen’s Wharf in 1929 by the contractor.

Additional Reading

• Brisbane Courier, 8 February, 1890, p. 5.
• Brisbane Courier, 21 January 1893, p. 4.

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The largest landowner on Queen’s Wharf during the nineteenth century, William Pettigrew, was from Ayrshire, Scotland. A trained surveyor, through his association with Dr John Dunmore Lang he migrated to Queensland, arriving in Brisbane on the Fortitude in January 1849. As the expected land grants associated with this immigration scheme proved non-existent, Pettigrew surveyed with the Government Surveyor Warner before joining Commissioner of Crown Lands Stephen Simpson in his journeys around the region. He also set out the plan on site for Simpson’s new home, Wolston House.

Pettigrew was encouraged by the stands of trees he had seen on his travel with Simpson. In 1852, through his brother in Scotland, he obtained second hand machinery for a steam driven saw mill, the first of its kind in Queensland. With £200 from his inheritance, he built a stone and timber wharf at the river’s edge of allotment no. 2. Pettigrew then had a basic mill building 25 feet (7.6 metres) wide and 80 feet (24.3 metres) long. It stood 14 feet (4.2 metres) in height. A brick chimney 40 feet (12.1 metres) high, constructed by John Petrie, served the twenty horsepower steam engine which drove a circular saw, a heavy frame saw and a turning lathe. The mill commenced operations on 28 June 1853.

Unfortunately this mill burnt to the ground on 8 July 1855. Pettigrew believed the culprits were pit sawyers who worked in the saw pits on allotments nos. 3 and 4 closer to Queen’s Wharf, which belonged to member of the Binstead family, also sawyers. Mechanisation would inevitably remove the need for their labours. Pettigrew rebuilt the mill and expanded his enterprise by constructing another mill at Dundathu outside Maryborough, which commenced operations in 1860.

In 1874 Pettigrew’s Brisbane saw mill was badly damaged in another fire. This fire started in a grain mill which he had established to use surplus steam. The grain mill was on allotment no. 1, which he had purchased from the Coutts family in 1872. Within two months the sawmill was again operational and four years later Pettigrew constructed a two-storey mill clad in corrugated iron on his original allotment, no. 2.

Eventually the sawmilling activities would spread across all the allotments to Queen’s Wharf, though the company never was able to purchase the Binstead’s allotments 3 and 4. A canny Scot, Pettigrew likewise never built large structures on these allotments, using them instead for stacking timber, a blacksmith’s shop and the earth closets which serviced the mill’s employees. He also made use of a wharf on allotment no. 4.

William Pettigrew had purchased allotment no. 5 from the liquidation sales of the assets of Orr and Honeyman in 1872. Here on the river bank Pettigrew established a large carpenter’s shop. In April 1874 Pettigrew purchased allotment no. 6 from Thomas Dowse and the same year allotment no. 7 from the widow of Patrick Mayne, Mary Mayne. He ran a railway system to the wharf of the former and made use of Dowse’s old two-storey stone store building, although it was at risk of sinking into the mud at the river’s edge. He established a timber yard at the eastern corner of the intersection of Margaret and William Streets, diagonally opposite the mill and owned other land in the near vicinity. The company traded as W. Pettigrew and Son after Robert Pettigrew turned twenty-one in March 1883 and received a ten per cent share.

Two events contributed to the decline of the Brisbane sawmill of William Pettigrew and Son. As a consequence of the 1874 fire, other mill operators made inroads into sawmilling, leaving Pettigrew competing for business rather than leading. Then the flood peaks of 1893 devastated the site, causing extensive damage to the mill buildings and sinking one of his steamers, the Tadorna Radjah. Other Pettigrew mills outside Brisbane also were affected. Soon after, a financial crisis that had been looming eventuated. Banks suspended payments, including the Royal Bank in which Pettigrew had invested. Creditors wanted their money.

In 1894 the process of liquidation of William Pettigrew and Son commenced. Pettigrew held on, just. Production recommenced at the sawmill adjacent to Queen’s Wharf, although on a significantly smaller scale. In 1898 the mill was inundated with flood water on three occasions. Foreclosure was inevitable. On 26 July 1898 Pettigrew signed a petition of insolvency, with the Union Bank taking possession of the mill. Contractors moved in. William Pettigrew and his son Robert moved away in March 1899. William Pettigrew died on 28 October 1906, while living with his daughter in Bowen.

Additional Reading

• Brown, Elaine. William Pettigrew 1825 – 1906: Sawmiller, surveyor, shipowner and citizen: an immigrant’s life in colonial Queensland, PhD thesis, University of Queensland, 2005. http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:189814
• Biography of William Pettigrew

Acknowledgement

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