Today’s Miller Park is in the foreground taken circa 1913 when the uppermost storey was being added to the Commissariat Store. QSA image 3056.
No permanent structure has ever been located on one small section of land between William Street and Queen’s Wharf Road. Miller Park, a government reserve since the end of the convict era, has been a grassy slope and a pedestrian short cut between the city and the river since the mid-nineteenth century.
In the nineteenth century, when the number of immigrants arriving exceeded the space available for their temporary accommodation, tents for single male immigrants were erected in Miller Park. When in 1913 an additional storey was added to the Commissariat Stores, a door was inserted in the north-west facing wall of the previous top floor to allow quick access via a gangway to the vacant land that Miller Park then was.
In the 1980s, when Brisbane City Council redeveloped and landscaped this section of land, it was designated Miller Park to acknowledge Lt Henry Miller of the 40th Regiment, the soldier responsible for establishing the Moreton Bay Penal Settlement in its Brisbane location in May 1825.
Additional Reading
Obituary of Captain Henry Miller.
Additional Image
An early view of Queen’s Wharf from today’s Miller Park, circa 1870. That the park was used as a pedestrian thoroughfare is clear from the worn track across the slope. SLQ image 7216.
