Maryborough ( ) is a city and a suburb in the Fraser Coast Region, Queensland, Australia. At the 2021 Census, the suburb of Maryborough had a population of 15,287.
Geography
Maryborough is located on the Mary River in Queensland, Australia, approximately north of the state capital, Brisbane. The city is served by the Bruce Highway. It is closely tied to its neighbour city Hervey Bay which is approximately northeast. Together they form part of the area known as the Fraser Coast.
The neighbourhood of Baddow is within the west of the suburb near the Mary River. It takes its name from Baddow House, a historic property in the area (). Baddow railway station () and Baddow Island () in the Mary River also take their names from the house.
History
Original inhabitants, language and culture
Evidence of human inhabitation of the Maryborough region stretches back to at least 6,000 years ago. The Gubbi Gubbi (Kabi Kabi) and Batjala (Butchulla) people were the original inhabitants of the region. The Gubbi Gubbi were described as an inland tribe of the Wide Bay–Burnett area, whose lands extended over 3,700 sq. miles and lay west of Maryborough. The northern borders ran as far as Childers and Hervey Bay. On the south, they approached the headwaters of the Mary River and Cooroy. Westwards, they reached as far as the Coast Ranges and Kilkivan. The Batjala occupied the more coastal regions including K’gari (Fraser Island).
The Batjala and Gubbi Gubbi spoke dialects of the Dippil language, the Batjala dialect being spoken in the Fraser Coast region, while the Gubbi Gubbi dialect was spoken in what is now the Gympie and Sunshine Coast regions.
The escaped convict James Davis lived among various clans of the Gubbi Gubbi and John Mathew, a clergyman turned anthropologist, also spent five years with them and mastered their language. Dippil language was first described by the Reverend William Ridley on the basis of notes taken from an interview with James Davis in 1855.
The Queensland lungfish was native to Gubbi Gubbi waters and the species fell under a taboo among them, forbidding its consumption. It was known in their language as 'dala'. The Batjala considered porpoises to be of a status close to sacred.
The arrival of the British
British navigators Matthew Flinders in 1802 and William Edwardson in 1822 were the first Europeans to take detailed surveys of the Hervey Bay coastline. They both noted that the native population living on its shores appeared numerous. The first British people to live in the region were escaped convicts from the Moreton Bay Penal Settlement. Convicts Richard Parsons and John Graham both briefly lived with local Aboriginals during the late 1820s. James Davis, however, lived with several Gubbi Gubbi clans from 1829 to 1842. He became a member of their society and was given the name Duramboi. In 1842, Andrew Petrie and Henry Stuart Russell sailed up the river known to the Gubbi as the Monoboola (later known as the Mary River) looking for land and timber to exploit. They found Duramboi living with the Ginginbara clan of the Gubbi along its banks at a camp close to where the town of Maryborough is now situated.
Colonisation and conflict
After these initial explorations, pastoral squatters started to enter the region looking to establish sheep stations. The first of these was Mynarton Joliffe who, under the employment of the prosperous squatter John Eales, overlanded 16,000 sheep and set up the Tiaro property in 1843. Aboriginal resistance was fierce, shepherds and livestock were killed, and Joliffe had to abandon the area within eighteen months. During this time, Commissioner of Crown Lands, Stephen Simpson visited the area and determined that the junction of two waterways (later known as the Mary river and Tinana Creek) would be a suitable place for a township. Squatters started to return to the area in 1847 after John Charles Burnett conducted a more thorough survey of the region.
