Brisbane Queensland Australia

Macquarie has appointed John Oxley as surveyor-general and sent him on expeditions up the coast of New South Wales and inland to find new rivers and new lands for settlement.

Oxley discovers the rich Northern Rivers and New England regions of New South Wales, and in what is now Queensland he explores the present site of Brisbane.

The Redcliffe settlement is abandoned after a year, and the colony is moved to a site on the Brisbane River now known as North Quay, twenty-eight kilometers (seventeen miles) south, which offers a more reliable water supply.

The newly selected region is plagued by mosquitoes.

Sir Thomas Brisbane had visited the settlement and traveled forty-five kilometers (twenty-eight miles) up the Brisbane River in December 1824, bestowing upon Brisbane the distinction of being the only Australian capital city set foot upon by its namesake.

Chief Justice Forbes had given the new settlement the name of Edenglassie before it was named Brisbane.

The Moreton Bay convict colony of Edengassie is designated a town in 1833 and named after former New South Wales governor Sir Thomas Brisbane. (Brisbane is today the third most populous city in Australia and the most populous city of Queensland, of which it is the capital.)

Augustus Gregory, an English-born explorer of Australia, mounts an ambitious expedition beginning at the mouth of the Victoria River, leaving Moreton Bay by sea on August 12, 1855.

Brisbane becomes the capital of the new colony of Queensland, separated on June 6, 1859 from New South Wales, on December 10.

Brisbane Grammar School is founded in 1868 under the Grammar Schools Act, which had been passed by the Queensland Government in 1860.

It is the second school established under this act in Queensland, with the first being Ipswich Grammar School.

The growth of the Australian sugar industry in Queensland in the 1870s had led to a search for laborers prepared to work in a tropical environment.

During this time, thousands of "Kanakas" (Pacific Islanders) have been brought into Australia as indentured workers.

This and related practices of bringing in nonwhite labor to be cheaply employed is commonly termed "blackbirding" and refers to the recruitment of people through trickery and kidnappings to work on plantations, particularly the sugar cane plantations of Queensland (Australia) and Fiji.

In the 1870s and 1880s, the trade union movement had begun a series of protests against foreign labor.

Their arguments are that Asians and Chinese take jobs away from white men, work for "substandard" wages, lower working conditions and refuse unionization.

Objections to these arguments have come largely from wealthy land owners in rural areas.

It is argued that without Asiatics to work in the tropical areas of the Northern Territory and Queensland, the area would have to be abandoned.

Despite these objections to restricting immigration, between 1875–1888 all Australian colonies enact legislation which excludes all further Chinese immigration.

Asian immigrants already residing in the Australian colonies are not expelled and retain the same rights as their Anglo and Southern compatriots.