The Vestibule
Welcome to the vestibule (also known as the hall) of Newstead House, an ideal starting point for your tour of this beautiful heritage home.
Explore the house and learn its history!
A special place
Acknowledging Brisbane
The Custodians of Country and Traditional Story Tellers
“Brisbane/Meanjin is an area of great cultural importance, once wild and rich where food was plentiful. The course of time has taken its toll, dispossession, and repossession. Aggrandising the stuff of country, of the waters. We are still belonging and not forgotten. We, the Aborigines, the First Australians.
Newstead House is a grand old house which is sited on an area of land alongside the waterways which remain significant to the Brisbane Traditional Aboriginal peoples. Newstead and Breakfast Creek region was once dotted with many Aboriginal Family Camps or Villages (Umpies). Traditional camps where people lived and died. It has a burial-grounds nearby to the house. My grandmother’s deceased baby was buried in a cemetery not far from the house. The large fig tree is believed to have been used for ceremonial purposes, with corroborees and ceremonies held on the nearby hills and flat areas. This resourceful region became attractive to the colony and its colonists, who over time forcibly drove the Aborigines away.
Newstead Point was known as Garranbinbilla.”
Aunty Raelene Baker (Wurrunghu)
Brisbane Elder
November, 2022
Place Names
Garranbinbilla or Karakan-pinbilli – Original names for Newstead Point, where Newstead House sits. Fibres for making huts were collected here from the local vine known as garran.
Maiwar – A name for upper parts of the Brisbane River.
Meanjin – A name for the spike of land where central Brisbane sits. It refers to the shape of the area which is similar to the spear, and also to its extensive areas of native tulipwood that was valued for making spears.
Ya-wa-gara – A name for Breakfast Creek, meaning ‘place of waters’ and ‘place of dancing’. It was named by Surveyor General John Oxley, who stopped here in 1823 and in 1824 while searching for a suitable location for a new settlement. While breakfasting on the banks, his crew met Aboriginal people. They got on well at first, but by the second day the crew fired at and wounded the locals. Despite this conflict, Oxley was so impressed by the abundance of resources, fishing, and life at Breakfast Creek that he recommended it for the site of the new city, although a location at the current city site was later chosen.
What was in this room?
Scroll through the 1890 auction catalogue below to find out what was in this room.
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3 Adjacent Rooms
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