How did Elizabeth St, Toowong get its name?

By Leigh Chamberlain

No, the name is not imperial in origin so it is not named after any of England’s queens such as Queen Elizabeth 1 or Queen Elizabeth 11 or even the Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother.

It is named for Mrs Elizabeth Hockings, the wife of Brisbane early settler and businessman A J Hocking (Alfred).

When Mrs Hockings attended an auction of crown lands in the west Toowong area, she successfully bid for a large block of land as an agent on behalf of Alfred Hockings. Later, the land was subdivided to create Wool, Elizabeth and Terrace Streets.

Alfred Hockings operated a seed nursery along the northern bank of the Milton and Auchenflower Reaches of the Brisbane River.

I once examined some of the early files of the Queensland Acclimatisation Society dated ca. mid-1860s at the SLQ and was interested to read a report that Hockings had imported a few specimens of a rare Chinese breed of sheep.

So I wondered if he had purchased his Toowong property to enable him to experiment with breeding these sheep to see whether this breed would acclimatise to the Brisbane climate,  and become an economic proposition to graze.

I interviewed an elderly resident in about 2004 whose late husband had had business dealings in the area in the 1920s. He had got to know an elderly resident who had had a farm growing crops along Wool Street opposite Anzac Park at the turn of the century. He had purchased a few blocks of land when the estate was subsidised.

I had also wondered who this elderly man could have been–maybe he was one of Samuel Earle’s cousins who had migrated to Brisbane and settled in the area.

So it seems as if the Wool -Terrace Street area had been certainly used as a farm in earlier times.

It would be wonderful to find some concrete evidence to prove this supposition is correct.