Colony of Queensland

The Colony of Queensland was a self-governing Crown colony within the British Empire that existed from 1859 until 1901, its territory carved out of the north of New South Wales. Queensland separated from New South Wales on 6 June 1859, and on 1 January 1901 it federated to become a state of the Commonwealth of Australia; at its greatest extent the colony included the present-day State of Queensland, the Territory of Papua and the Coral Sea Islands Territory. Its capital had grown from a penal outpost: in 1823 John Oxley sailed north from Sydney to inspect Port Curtis and Moreton Bay as possible sites for a penal colony, found the Brisbane River whose existence Cook had predicted, and in September 1824 established a temporary settlement on the Redcliffe Peninsula; on 2 December 1824 the Moreton Bay penal settlement was transferred to the Brisbane River, where the central business district of Brisbane now stands, the name Brisbane Town in use for the settlement since at least November 1828. From that convict riverside post the free colony of 1859 grew, with Brisbane its capital, into the sugar- and pastoral lands of the north, until federation closed the colony's separate record.