Situated on a curve of the broad Mary river, Maryborough is 30km inland from the Fraser Coast and 260km north of Brisbane in sunny south east Queensland, Australia.
The City is about 3 hours drive along the Bruce Highway from Brisbane, about a 1 hour drive south from Bundaberg, and about 35 minutes from Hervey Bay. By public transport from Brisbane, Maryborough can be reached in 50 minutes by commuter aircraft, 4 hours by coach and also by electric rail. The city's airport is 38 meters above sea level.
Maryborough was first settled by Europeans in 1847 as a wool port, thereby disrupting the lives of Aboriginal tribes here many thousands of years earlier.
The first inhabitants of Australia were the Aboriginal people whose history, though unrecorded, is now believed to date back to before the Ice Age. Evidence from Tasmania indicates some Aborigines survived the Ice Age by living in caves. Their history began in a time they call the Dreaming, when the Ancestor Spirits emerged from the earth and gave form to the landscape. Anthropologists believe that Aboriginal peoples reached eastern Australia at least 40,000 years ago. Tribes lived in the area now known as Maryborough until the English arrived and caused violent disruption to their lives.
Maryborough is one of Queensland's oldest cities, being first settled by Europeans in 1847 as a wool port. In the early days of European settlement in Australia, Maryborough served as an immigration port for free settlers and was second only to Sydney on the eastern seaboard. The colony of Queensland separated from the colony of New South wales in 1859. Maryborough was gazetted a port of entry and not long after, in 1861, the township was proclaimed a municipality. Immigrants from Europe continued to arrive; by the end of the 1860s the total number of such arrivals had reached 23,000.
Sailing ships carrying immigrants rarely attempted to navigate the Mary River to the place where the city stands today. Instead, they anchored in Hervey Bay and passengers were ferried from there in smaller boats. The Silver Eagle pictured here arrived in May 1880 with 264 immigrants after battling strong gales along the way.
The voyage took just over 3 months.
Ambitions of the European squatters and settlers to acquire the land around Maryborough, without thought or reference to the Aboriginal inhabitants, resulted in predictable conflict. The actions of a few Aboriginals were more than outweighed by the horrors inflicted on local tribes by white settlers. Poisoning of waterholes and serving up meals of flour and bran laced with strychnine and arsenic were among the ways the whites dealt with the black "problem".
Wholesale slaughter of hundreds of innocent Aboriginals took place in retribution for the actions of a few. Settlers enlisted renegade blacks from further south to act as native police, assisting their mass killings of fellow Aboriginals and providing a convenient excuse when blamed for the bloody raids. Mainland Aboriginals were exiled to Fraser Island, but here too they were persecuted, with many being driven into the sea to their deaths on Christmas Eve of 1851 by native police under the local white commandant.
The timber industry began its development in the area with the establishment of a sawmill in 1861. The Maryborough Sugar Company was formed in 1865. A gold rush at Gympie (to the south) in 1867 was the catalyst in the establishment of Walker's foundry and engineering works, which supplied mining equipment to Gympie initially, and later to other areas in the colony. Walker's made its first locomotive in 1873.
In 1889 the first agricultural show was held, at showgrounds established in Alice Street. The Mary river flooded in 1893, rising some 12.2 meters above its normal level. It washed away more than 100 houses, devastated farms and plantations, and destroyed Hyne's sawmill in Kent Street.
Maryborough suffered Australia's only outbreak of the deadly Pneumonic Plague in 1905, the same year Maryborough was gazetted a city. The present city hall opened in 1908.
After World War 1 Walkers built two 6600 ton ships, and in 1925 a dredge. The shipyards were reactivated in 1939 when World War 2 began. They built seven corvettes and three frigates, and at the height of production employed 1200 men.
In 1932, radio station 4MB commenced broadcasting from the home of Alf Wynne, in Kent Street. The nightly entertainment commenced at 6.30pm, when the Tiny Tots were entertained by Uncle Alf (Alf Wynne) and his band of helpers. Dinner music commenced at 7.00pm and continued until 8.00pm, when a concert was presented each evening, closing at 10.00pm.
The Australian Broadcasting Commission opened the Maryborough radio studio 4QB in 1950, and in 1965 Wide Bay Burnett Television P/L began transmitting. The city waited until August 1997 for its own Internet access provider, AIA, later to be renamed Satcom and eventually taken over by Big.net.au. The website Maryborough City Life came into being a year earlier, instantly becoming the best promotion of the city on the Internet.
Today, timber, sugar, engineering and government are the backbone of Maryborough's economy, and its human population is estimated to be around 26,500. It is a city of serenity compared with many, and mindful of its heritage.