Colony of Queensland

The Colony of Queensland was a colony of the British Empire from 1859 to 1901, when it became a State in the federal Commonwealth of Australia on 1 January 1901. At its greatest extent, the colony included the present-day State of Queensland, the Territory of Papua and the Coral Sea Islands Territory.

In 1823, John Oxley sailed north from Sydney to inspect Port Curtis (now Gladstone) and Moreton Bay as possible sites for a penal colony. At Moreton Bay, he found the Brisbane River whose existence Cook had predicted, and proceeded to explore the lower part of it. In September 1824, he returned with soldiers and 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 (CBD) of Brisbane now stands. The name Brisbane Town was in use for the settlement since at least November 1828.

Major Edmund Lockyer discovered outcrops of coal along the banks of the upper Brisbane River in 1825.

In 1839, transportation of convicts ceased, culminating in the closure of the Brisbane penal settlement. In 1842, free settlement was permitted.^{[citation needed]} In the same year Andrew Petrie reported favourable grazing conditions and decent forests to the north of Brisbane, which led shortly to the arrival of settlers to Fraser Island and the Cooloola coast region.

In 1847, the Port of Maryborough was opened as a wool port.

The first immigrant ship to arrive in Moreton Bay was the Artemisia in 1848.^{[citation needed]}

In 1857, Queensland's first lighthouse was built at Cape Moreton.^{[citation needed]}

Fighting between Aboriginal people and settlers in colonial Queensland was more bloody than in any other colonial state in Australia, perhaps partly due to Queensland having a larger pre-contact indigenous population than any other colony in Australia, accounting for over one third, and in some estimates close to forty percent, of the entire pre-contact population of the continent.^{[citation needed]} It is estimated that some 1,500 European settlers, including women and children – and their Chinese, Aboriginal, and Melanesian allies – died in frontier skirmishes with Aboriginals in Queensland during the nineteenth century. The casualties among the Aboriginal fighters suffered in these battles with settlers and native police (frequently described by contemporary political leaders and newspapers as "warfare", "a kind of warfare", "guerrilla-like warfare", and at times as a "war of extermination") is estimated to have exceeded 30,000. Others have suggested there were more Aboriginal casualties. The "Native Police Force" (sometimes "Native Mounted Police Force"), recruited and deployed by the Queensland government, was a key unit in the war between the new arrivals and the aboriginal fighters.