Product Code Database
Bundaberg () is the major regional city in the Wide Bay-Burnett region of the state of Queensland, Australia. It is the ninth largest city in the state. The Bundaberg central business district is situated along the southern bank of the Burnett River about from its mouth at Burnett Heads, where it flows into the Coral Sea. The city is sited on a rich floodplain, supporting one of the nation's most productive agricultural regions. The area of Bundaberg is the home of the Taribelang, Goreng Goreng, Gurang, and Bailai peoples. The common nickname for Bundaberg is "Bundy", although its history as a major sugar producing region means it is often referenced as the "Rum City" or "Sugar City". The residents of the city are referred to colloquially as 'Bundabergians.' In the , the Bundaberg urban area had a population of 73,747 people.
The district surveyor, John Thompson Charlton designed the city layout in 1868, which planned for uniform square blocks with wide main streets, and named it ‘Bundaberg’. An early influence on the development of Bundaberg came with the 1868 Land Act, which was a famous Queensland via media, that aimed to create a class of Yeoman. Large sugarcane plantations were established throughout the 1880s, with industries of sugar mills, refineries, and rum distilleries that delivered prosperity to Bundaberg. These plantations used South Sea Islanders as indentured labourers, many of whom were Blackbirding, a practice considered a form of slavery. The trade was outlawed in 1904, with most South Sea Islanders deported by 1906.Tracey Flanagan, Meredith Wilkie, and Susanna Iuliano. "Australian South Sea Islanders: A Century of Race Discrimination under Australian Law" , Australian Human Rights Commission. Major floods in 1942 and 1954 damaged the river, ending Bundaberg's role as a Inland port and led to a new port at the mouth of the Burnett river. In the Post-war, Bundaberg continued to grow with its wealth tied to its sugar industry. In 2013, Bundaberg experienced record flooding from Cyclone Oswald, which was the worst disaster in the city's history.
The economy of Bundaberg is based primarily on agriculture, forestry, fishing and tourism, with a gross regional product at about $5.62 billion as of June 2023. Bundaberg also has a major distillery and brewery industry that exports to international markets. The city is served by the Port of Bundaberg and the Bundaberg Airport.
Bundaberg has a rich history and culture, along with its humid subtropical climate it is known for its weeping fig trees, dry stone walls, and historic plantations, including the Fairymead Plantation and the Sunnyside Sugar Plantation, the latter of which is the site of a mass grave. Other sites of South Sea Islander cultural significance include Sir Anthony's Rest atop the Bundaberg Hummock and the South Sea Islander Church. Major cultural institutions include the Hinkler Hall of Aviation and the Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery. The city's culinary culture is highlighted by its annual 'Burnett Bridge', and an iconic rum and gin culture with Bundaberg Rum originating in the city.
Bundaberg is a popular tourism destination, the city's hinterland includes the historic towns of Childers and Gin Gin, Lake Monduran, Cania Gorge National Park and the Promisedland mountain bike trails. Bundaberg's coastal areas include Bargara and Mon Repos, Deepwater National Park, and the southernmost reaches of the Great Barrier Reef alongside the islands of Lady Musgrave and Lady Elliot.
Colloquially, the city is widely known throughout Australia as "Bundy". Residents are referred to by the demonym Bundabergian, which is also a corresponding adjective.
A pioneer pastoralist of the region, Nicholas Tooth, wrote that "Bourbong" was derived from the local Aboriginal phrase "bier rabong", meaning "plenty dead". Tooth, who took up land in the area in the early 1860s, found that Aboriginal people resolutely avoided the "bier rabong" vicinity. He later found the skeletal remains there of around twenty Aboriginal people who were apparently massacred in a raid by the Native Police.
As such, the Bundaberg Regional Council has reflected this recognition in their "First Nations Strategy 2022-2026", and endeavours to celebrate and embrace the region's "local connections to First Nation Peoples and other cultures".
British occupation of the land in the region began in 1848 when pastoral squatters Gregory Blaxland Jnr and William Forster established a sheep station. Blaxland was a son of the Blue Mountains explorer, Gregory Blaxland, and Forster was later to become a Premier of New South Wales. They selected a very large area of land which encompassed most of the western part of the modern day Bundaberg Region along the Burnett River. They named this pastoral lease Tirroan.
Blaxland and Forster had previously set up sheep stations near the Clarence River and had a notable history of conflict with Aboriginal people. Sheep stations imposed on native bushland disrupt native food production, typically resulting in widespread hunger and illness amongst native peoples. Conflict continued at Tirroan when two of their shepherds were killed by Aboriginal people in 1849. Forster and Blaxland led a punitive expedition causing multiple Aboriginal deaths. Further conflict occurred the following year when Blaxland was clubbed to death. Forster and a number of other squatters conducted another reprisal, resulting in a large massacre of Aboriginal people in scrubland toward the coastal part of Tirroan.
In the early 1850s, Forster sold the property to Alfred Henry Brown who changed the name of the pastoral lease to Gin Gin. At the same time, Native Police officer, Richard Purvis Marshall, took up the Bingera leasehold in the rainforest scrubland downstream from Tirroan. Three towns in the Bundaberg region, Tirroan, South Bingera and Gin Gin, commemorate these massive initial leaseholds.
Timber companies, such as that owned by William Pettigrew, started the logging of the Woongarra Scrub in 1867. In 1868, Samuel Johnston erected a sawmill in Waterview, on the north bank of the Burnett River. The Waterview sawmill became a prominent supplier of timber until its closure in 1903 after being damaged by flood.
The initial 35 years of the sugar industry in Bundaberg was reliant on South Sea Islander workers, who were often blackbirded and kept in a status close to slavery. The first significant shipload of Kanaka labour, as it was called, to arrive on the Burnett River came in January 1872 aboard the Petrel. Allegations of kidnapping and wounding immediately arose concerning the recruitment of the Islanders on this vessel. Influential Bundaberg plantation owners were able to purchase recruiting ships in order to obtain labour directly from areas such as the Solomon Islands and the Vanuatu. The Young Brothers owned the Lochiel and the May vessels, the Cran family and Frederic Buss were the major investors in the Helena while the Ariel was co-owned by a number of local planters. While some of the recruitment was voluntary, violence and deception toward Islanders often took place. For example, the crew of the Helena fought a battle with the locals of Ambrym while taking Islanders from there.
These labourers had to work for three years and were only paid at the end of this time period. Instead of cash, they usually received substandard goods and trinkets of minimal value as payment. Excessive mortality of the Islanders while serving their term of labour in the Bundaberg region was frequent. Overwork, poor housing, inadequate food, contaminated water supplies and a lack of medical care all contributed to the high death rate. Penalties for the plantation owners whose neglect resulted in these fatalities were rare and did not exceed a £10 fine. Importing South Sea Islander labour was made illegal in 1904 and enforced repatriation of these workers out of Bundaberg and other locations in Queensland occurred from 1906 to 1908.
The 1911 Queensland sugar strike occurred after the phasing out of South Sea Islander labour, with workers claiming that many plantation owners had substituted black indentured labourers (sometimes referred to as slaves) with white ones. Workers sought better accommodation, wages and conditions, including an eight-hour day and a minimum weekly wage of 30 shillings, including food. The mobilisation of unionists from Bundaberg to Mossman was a major achievement, with the 1911 strike lasting over seven weeks in Bundaberg where the town's economy was largely based on the sugar industry.Janette Nolan, Bundaberg, history and people, St Lucia: University of Queensland press, 1978, p. 147. The end result of the strike was a Commonwealth Royal Commission into the sugar industry in 1911–12, which had been initially requested by Harry Hall, a Bundaberg AWA organiser in 1908 with a petition signed by 1500 Bundaberg sugar workers.Brisbane Courier, 21 October 1908, p.5; Nolan, p. 146. The Royal Commission, with ALF Secretary Albert Hinchcliffe as secretary, concluded the AWA demands had been justified. The union victory was a watershed in organised labour in Queensland and Australia.Dr K H Kennedy, "The Rise of the Amalgamated Workers Association" in Lectures on North Queensland History, James Cook University, Second Series 1975, pp. 198–199.
With the passage of the Local Authorities Act 1902, Barolin Division became the Shire of Barolin and the Borough of Bundaberg became the Town of Bundaberg on 31 March 1903. On 22 November 1913, Bundaberg was proclaimed a City. Queensland Government Gazette, Vol. CL, 22 November 1913, p.1422.
In 1912 Bundaberg pioneering aviator Bert Hinkler built and successfully flew his own glider on Mon Repos beach. He also completed a noteworthy non-stop flight from London to Turin in 1920. The following year in 1921 Hinkler flew from Sydney to Bundaberg, non-stop, in a record breaking flight of 8 and a half hours, in the process beating a telegram he had sent to his mother, to warn her of his arrival.O'Connor, T. (1996). A Pictorial History Of Queensland. Brisbane: Robert Brown & Associates (Qld) Pty Limited, pp.271–272.
The Bundaberg War Memorial commemorating those who died in the Anglo-Boer War and World War I was unveiled by Major-General Charles Brand on 30 July 1921. The Bundaberg digger was imported from Italy and is constructed of Italian marble. The completed memorial, at a cost of £1,650, was the third most costly to be erected in Queensland. It is a major regional memorial and one of the two most intact digger memorials that remain in their original settings of intersections.
The Bundaberg tragedy of 1928 resulted in the deaths of 12 children in a 24-hour period after they were administered a contaminated diphtheria vaccine.
In 1941 the Sisters of Mercy purchased the house Brabourne (originally owned by prominent citizen Frederick Buss) and established St Mary's Hostel, for women and girls working in or visiting Bundaberg. After World War II, doctors were calling for modern hospital facilities in Bundaberg, so the Sisters converted the hostel into the Mater Private Hospital, a 24-bed hospital with an operating theatre, chapel, and accommodation for the nurses and maids, officially opening on 28 July 1946. The nurses were initially all nuns, but they established a training school for other women to become nurses. The hospital expanded over the years with additional beds, operating theatres, X-ray, pathology and a dedicated children's ward. It was the first hospital in Queensland to use the Zeiss ophthalmic microscope, the first regional hospital in Queensland to have a Lymphedema clinic, and to use facial recognition technology for endoscopic sinus surgery.
In the 1960s the township was completely flooded by the Burnett river. In 1967 Bundaberg celebrated its centenary by producing a coin and opening The Bundaberg and District Historical Museum in the Bundaberg Botanical Gardens in Bundaberg North.
Two years later, in January 2013, Bundaberg experienced its worst flooding in recorded history as a result of Cyclone Oswald. Floodwaters from the Burnett River peaked at 9.53 metres. Over 4,000 properties and 600 businesses had been affected by floodwaters, which moved in excess of . Two defence force Blackhawk helicopters were brought in from Townsville as part of the evacuation operation, which ultimately used an additional 14 aircraft.
On 6 April 2018, Prince Charles visited Bundaberg Rum Distillery He stated, “I'm thrilled that this Distillery's proving to be the one that produces some of the most famous and special of all rums around the world."
In 2018, the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated the population of Bundaberg's significant urban area was 70,921 people. Estimated resident population, 30 June 2018.
In the 2016 Census, there were 69,069 people in Bundaberg (Significant Urban Area). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people made up 4.3% of the population. 81.2% of people were born in Australia. The next most common countries of birth were England 3.2%, New Zealand 1.8%, Philippines 0.7%, South Africa 0.5% and Scotland 0.4%. 88.9% of people spoke only English at home. Other languages spoken at home included Mandarin 0.5%, Italian 0.4%, German 0.3%, Afrikaans 0.2% and Tagalog 0.2%. The most common responses for religion were No Religion 26.3%, Catholic 18.7% and Anglican 18.6%. Material was copied from this source, which is available under a .
In the , Bundaberg's urban area has a population of 73,747 people.
Another of the city's exports is Bundaberg Rum, made from the sugar cane by-product molasses. Bundaberg is also home to beverage producer Bundaberg Brewed Drinks Vintage Soda, Craft Brewery Ballistic Brewing Company and Craft Distillery's Waterview Distillery and Kalki Moon.
Commercial fruit and vegetable production is also significant: avocado, banana, bean, button squash, capsicum, chilli, citrus, cucumber, custard apple, egg fruit, honeydew melon, lychee, mango, passionfruit, potato, pumpkin, rockmelon, snow peas, stone fruit, sweet corn, sweet potato, tomato, watermelon, zucchini. Macadamia nuts are also grown. Due to the year-round farm work available in Bundaberg, the city has a high number of working hostels for backpackers looking to extend their working holiday visa in Australia. The hostels provide backpackers with work on farms across the Bundaberg area. However, the hostels and farms have received huge criticism in the press and on social media due to the treatment some backpackers have faced. The Courier-Mail have reported claims of poor living conditions, underpayment and allegations of sexual abuse which they say has led to backpackers warning others about working hostels in Bundaberg.
Because of its high rate of unemployment, Bundaberg has been referred to as the "dole capital of Australia".
Nearby beaches are popular with both locals and tourists. Moore Park Beach, to the city's north, has of golden sandy beach. Beaches on the southern side of the Burnett River are (from north to south) the Oaks Beach, Mon Repos, Nielson Park, Bargara Beach, Kellys Beach, Innes Park and Elliott Heads.
Cania Gorge National Park, Deepwater National Park, Eurimbula National Park and Kinkuna National Park, located in the Bundaberg region are popular with campers and bush-lovers.
Tours of the Bundaberg Rum distillation and attractions at Bundaberg Botanic Gardens, such as the 2 ft narrow gauge Australian Sugar Cane Railway, are also popular with tourists. The Mystery Craters, 35 unexplained water-filled holes in the ground, discovered in 1971 at South Kolan, are also a tourist attraction.
Opened in 2002 by the former member for Hinkler Paul Neville, the Tom Quinn Community Centre gardens (a multiple "Bundy in Bloom" winner) is a site to be seen with local flora and fauna, its own cafe, marketplace, chapel, green house, training facilities, woodwork and indigenous nature section.
Opened in December 2008, the Hinkler Hall of Aviation is an historical aviation tourist attraction that celebrates pioneer solo aviator Bert Hinkler. In 1928, Hinkler was the first person to fly solo from England to Australia. The museum includes an exhibition hall, featuring multi-media exhibits, a flight simulator, a theatre, five aircraft and the historic Hinkler House.
Other local attractions and events include the Whaling Wall, East Bundaberg Water Tower, Baldwin Swamp Environmental Park, Alexandra Park Zoo, Buss Park, Barrell House, Bundy in Bloom, Whale watching, reef tours of Lady Musgrave & Lady Elliiot islands, the Bundaberg Show, Bundaberg & Childers Regional Art Galleries, the Bundaberg Gliding school, Fishing Charters, the Bundaberg International Air Show, and the Woongarra Marine Park.
Bundaberg has Ghost hunting.
The Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery (BRAG) is a large multi-purpose visual arts facility located in central Bundaberg. The Bundaberg Regional Council operates a public library at 49 Woondooma Street.
Bundaberg is served by three commercial television stations (Seven Queensland, WIN Television and 10) and publicly owned services (ABC TV) and (SBS).
Local news coverage of Bundaberg and the Wide Bay is provided on all three commercial networks with both Seven News and RTQ's WIN News half-hour bulletins airing at 5:30 each weeknight. Southern Cross Austereo also airs brief local news & weather updates at various intervals throughout the day on Channel 10.
Bundaberg was home to the Bundaberg Spirit soccer club. They participated in the Queensland State League against other teams across Queensland.
Bundaberg has three public high schools, Bundaberg North State High School which opened on 29 January 1974, Bundaberg State High School which opened on 30 January 1912 (the second-oldest high school in Queensland that is still open) and Kepnock State High School which opened on 28 January 1964. There are also three main private secondary schools: Shalom Catholic College, St Luke's Anglican School, and Bundaberg Christian College.
There is a campus of the Wide Bay Institute of Technical and further education on Walker St and a campus of the Central Queensland University, located adjacent to the airport. There is a campus of the Booth College at the Salvation Army's Tom Quinn Community Centre.
Bundaberg's bus operator is Duffy's City Buses. As of 2013, they transport over 1000 passengers in town services, and over 2000 passengers in school services every day. Routes extend to the beach suburbs of Burnett Heads, Bargara, and Innes Park. Stewart & Sons also operates bus services in the area.
Bundaberg is serviced by several Queensland Rail passenger trains, including the Tilt Train and is approximately four and a half hours north of Brisbane by rail. The closed North Bundaberg station formerly served the Mount Perry railway line and is now a museum.
South of Bundaberg at 24°56'43"S 152°22'5"E, there is one of the weirdest crossings of two railway lines, as there criosses a narrow gauge railway line of a sugar plantage a normal gauge railway on a drawbridge [3].
Bundaberg is situated at the end of the Isis Highway (State Route 3), approximately east of its junction with the Bruce Highway. Many long-distance bus services also pass through the city.
Bundaberg Port is located northeast of the city, at the mouth of the Burnett River. The port is a destination for ships from Australia and overseas. It is predominantly used for shipping raw sugar and other goods related to that industry such as Bundaberg Rum.
The Friendly Society Hospital has undergone a redevelopment and forms part of the GP Super Clinic Program.
Bundaberg is also home to the Royal Flying Doctor Service, who regularly transport patients to Bundaberg from more rural and remote areas, as well as transferring critically ill patients to Brisbane for specialist care.
| 12 May 1998 |
| 9 November 1998 |
|
|
