WHAT happens when four different government departments choose to name places or institutions according to their own set of guidelines?
Confusion and often dysfunction.
There was the Lands Department whose role it was to survey new townships as the big station runs were broken up to offer new settlers an opportunity to farm. Surveyors from this department were also charged with drawing up town blocks where it was thought new villages should cluster.
The role of the Postmaster General’s department was to approve new post and telegraph outlets. Often this would be in existing places of commerce such as the local shop which sold all manner of foodstuffs and goods.
The Railway department was charged with establishing stations or sidings as the rail lines pushed out into the countryside to link established townships and give local farmers places to load their produce at stations or sidings between the two centres.
The Education department’s role was to approve new schools in places where the local community was prepared to financially support the construction of the new buildings.
And in the early days of settlement, it seemed that the four departments took little notice of the names chosen for places or institutions by the other departments.
Such was the case in 1886, when it was announced in the Government Gazette that ‘hereinafter the Western Creek Railway Station shall be known as the Calvert Railway Station’.
A letter to the editor to the Brisbane Courier in March 1886 castigated the Railway department for its decision.
An announcement in last Saturday’s “Government Gazette” induces me to draw attention, through your columns, to the pressing necessity for some particular government department being specially charged with the nomenclature of localities, in order to prevent duplication in a double sense – giving two names to one place, and one name to two or more different places.
The “Government Gazette” states that it is notified, that in future “Western Creek” railway station will be called “Calvert”.
Why the name Calvert should be fixed upon I cannot surmise, but surely the person who gave the place that name must be ignorant of the fact that it has been called Alfred for the past fifteen or twenty years, and is marked as such upon government maps and plans.
I believe the school is known as the Alfred State school, and there can be no valid reason that whilst the Lands Department and Education Department call the place Alfred, the Railway Department and Post Office should arbitrarily determine to designate it Calvert.
The district today holds the name of Calvert but as the letter writer indicates, it was not always so.
The first known building in the area was a slab hut built by Sam and Sally Owens.
It was opened as an inn by the Owens around 1843.
Little is known about the Owens although an article in the Brisbane Courier in August 1907 gives some detail.
In the squatting days, the valley where Marburg now stands was known as First Plain, and over the hill, where is now Minden, was called Second Plain.
Some early settlers to the area were Sam and Sarah (Sally) Owens.
They ran the Tarampa sheep station around 1842.
Mr Owens and his wife, who was known as Sally, were shepherding sheep on the land so the grassy flats became known at that time as Sally Owens’ Plains.
The inn was a popular camping place for bullock teams and horse riders as it was beside the track that led to Drayton (later Drayton Swamp which would become Toowoomba).
A village was surveyed around the inn (a newer building built by a man named McKeown) in 1854 and it was given the name Alfred in honour of an early settler, Alfred Parkinson.
When the state’s first railway line from Ipswich to Bigge’s Camp (Grandchester) was opened in 1865, the settlers around Alfred petitioned the Railway department for a station. The department agreed, and opened a station there in 1866, and called it Western Creek Railway Station.
Seven years later in 1872, the Education department opened a school in the village and named it Alfred State School.
The renaming of the railway station to Calvert, 12 years later prompted the postal department to follow suit but not so the Education department.
While many articles online suggest that the village itself was renamed Calvert in 1931, there are newspaper articles in the early 1890s, referring to the township as Calvert and the local authority was by then making reference to the ‘Rosewood Calvert Road’.
There is some debate over the origin of the name, Calvert.
Some suggest it was in honour of one of the men involved in Ludwig Leichhardt’s 1844 expedition, but it is far more likely to have been named after an early settler in the area, James Calvert.
And the prompt to change the name to Calvert resulted from the confusion in the Postmaster General’s department as the mail to Alfred was often mixed up with the mail to Alford – a village in the Boonah area.
