New Farm Park is a heritage-listed riverfront public park at 137 Sydney Street, New Farm, City of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. It was designed by Albert Herbert Foster and built from 1914 to 1950 by Gladwin Legge & Co. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 7 February 2005.
The park covers and is at the southeastern end of the New Farm peninsula on a bend in the Brisbane River. The Powerhouse arts centre is at the eastern end of the park. The park includes the New Farm Park ferry wharf and links to the Brisbane Riverwalk from Newstead to Toowong. It is one of Brisbane's most popular parklands and tourist attractions.
History
New Farm Park, created in 1914, currently covers of land, and is bounded by Brunswick Street and Sydney Street, New Farm. It adjoins the Brisbane Powerhouse arts precinct and the Brisbane River.
Prior to European settlement, the New Farm area was covered with bush and dotted with shallow lagoons. It supported a variety of wildlife and proved a bountiful resource to local Aborigines. The area was called Binkin-ba meaning place of the land tortoise.
Following the founding of the Moreton Bay convict settlement on the Brisbane River, the land on which the park now stands was initially a farm. A racecourse was built on the site in 1846, which operated until 1913, when the land for the park was acquired by the Brisbane City Council. The Queensland Governor Hamilton Goold-Adams conducted the official opening of the park, which was delayed until July 1919 because of World War I.
After a penal settlement was founded in 1825 at the location of the current Brisbane central business district, food was grown on cleared land in South Brisbane and the present City Botanical Gardens. In 1827 Captain Patrick Logan ordered the clearing of a new farm between the present day Merthyr Road and the river; drainage canals were dug, and convict labourers grew maize, potatoes, pumpkin, and corn. The convicts were marched to work each day from their main barracks in town, following a track on high ground that later became Moray Street. Due to the decline of the penal settlement following changes in British policy, free settlement began in Brisbane in 1842. A farmer named Prendegast appears to have planted maize at the new farm in 1842, although he was only leasing the land.
Speculators in 1844 purchased the new farm's lowlands, and tenant farming followed, with dairying and small crops. Early resident Richard Jones acquired in 1847, and called it "New Farm". Later Jones would become the first Brisbane person to be a Member in the New South Wales Legislative Council (prior to the separation of Queensland in 1859).
In 1846 the Moreton Bay Jockey Club moved its annual race from Coopers Plains to land at New Farm owned by Thomas Adams. This land included Eastern Suburban Allotments 22, 28, 29 and 30, located at the south-eastern corner of the New Farm peninsula. The first (members only) meeting was held in May 1846, and public attendance began at the 1848 three-day race meeting. By 1849 the "Brisbane Races" were being held over the Christmas-New Year's period. The race meetings moved to Eagle Farm in 1861.
Opinions vary as to the exact location of the racetrack itself. During the 1880s the land once owned by Thomas Adams was marketed for subdivision as the "Old Racecourse Estate", but allotments 28 to 30 included both the site of New Farm Park, as well as the land to the north of the small creek that formed the park's north-eastern boundary. In 1895, Merthyr Road was known as "Old Racecourse Road", and in 1913 the annual report of Henry Moore referred to the "old racecourse paddock" that was to become "New Farm Park". A 1925 aerial photo (John Oxley Library) appears to show the remains of the track on the site of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company Refinery and the site of the Powerhouse, intersected by Lamington Street near the river.
As horse racing disappeared from the area, suburban Brisbane was growing. The Municipality of Brisbane was formed in 1859, and the small farms of New Farm gave way in the 1870s to the residences of Brisbane's elite. Sir Samuel Griffith purchased bounded by Sydney Street and Moray Street in 1870, and built his residence "Merthyr" in 1881 (demolished 1963).