Why was the settlement of Brisbane made at the mouth of the river and not further inland?
At that stage, exploration had been made to the inland regions north and northwest of Sydney, but no-one had yet breached the Great Dividing Range which would have brought them through to the coast from the inland route. That only came when botanist Allan Cunningham sighted Cunningham’s Gap and the pastoral country of the Darling Downs on 25 August 1828. This was some five years after the discovery of the Brisbane River, and four years after the founding of the first Moreton Bay colony.
