Up the Creek

When I went to school we learnt about the early expeditions of the men who first explored Australia.  A child who did not know the names of “The Explorers” and where they had explored had something lacking in their education.  I think most kids were like me, totally in awe of these fearless men. Surely they must have been fearless.  Either that or crazy to go off exploring in that harsh land the way they did.  I suspect it was a combination of both.  Allan Cunningham was one of these early explorers and on the morning of 23 August, 1828 August he and his troop of men left their tents to climb a high point of what they thought was the Great Dividing Range but was actually the Little Liverpool Range, expecting to see a passage to the Darling Downs which he had discovered from the west the previous year and now sought a way through the 'gap” from the east. 

The party reached the summit of Mt Beau Brummel from which they observed a valley and named it Laidley Creek Valley after a prominent NSW public servent.  Those early explorers may have been fearless and slightly crazy but, even then, they had to play the political game and keep in good with prominent officials, the guys who held or influenced the purse strings and so funded their wanderings.

Because there was a penal colony at Moreton Bay no free settlement was allowed within a fifty-mile radius and so this lovely valley remained uninhabited except for the local aborigines until 1842.   We might have been taught about the explorers but about the previous occupants of the lands we learnt very little indeed, unless they killed an explorer. 

After 1842, squatters began to settle there and a village gradually grew around an inn and a lagoon where drovers and their stock rested.  Many of the original buildings have been preserved in the Laidley Pioneer Village on land that was gifted to the council by my maternal grandfather, while the lagoon where cattle once slaked their thirst is now a pleasant flora and fauna sanctuary. 

Laidley is now a sleepy little township calling itself the 'Country Garden of Queensland' because of the rich soils surrounding the town support farming, vegetable growing for the Brisbane markets, dairying and cotton.  It's only 83 km and a comfortable hour's drive from Brisbane.  

The first bridge was built in 1863 and this enabled the area “up the creek” to be settled by both squatters and legitimate landholders. And it was up the creek that both sides of my ancestors settled, Dad's family at Thornton and Mum's family at Townson further up the creek, where there are six families listed as the first settlers, my maternal grandmothers and grandfather's families among them.   

They broke in the land along the fertile banks of the Laidley Creek which has its source in the mountains behind Townson. 

The road follows the creek up the valley with the Little Liverpool Range to the east and the Mistake Mountains to the west.  And Mt Castle standing there like a fortress at the head of the valley.