Brassall

Brassall, an outer north-western suburb of Ipswich, is 5 km from the city's centre. The name was taken from Brassall Parish, named by surveyor James Warner in about 1851.

Situated west of the Ipswich coal fields, Brassall was a rural area which had its own shire council (1886) administering an area of 313 sq km. The local primary school opened in 1894. Before then schooling was conducted in the Methodist church (1865).

The eastern-most part of Brassall was within walking distance of the North Ipswich railway workshops, and civic facilities such as the Brassall hall and the Anglican and Presbyterian churches were in Waterworks Road, the main route down to the workshops. The western side of Brassall included the Brisbane Valley railway to Esk (1886), the nearest station being Muirlea, about 600m north of the Warrego Highway. The shire was one of several united as Moreton shire in 1917.

In the early postwar years when the need for a state high school was felt, a site in semi-urban Brassall was found for Ipswich State High (1951). That particular part of Brassall, however, was in the Ipswich city municipality, and other parts of Brassall were administered by separate local government authorities. Ipswich's metropolitan growth crossed into Brassall in the 1970s and there was considerable residential growth around the Warrego Highway by the 1990s. South of the highway, a retirement village was built in 1978, at that time beyond suburban Brassall. Fifteen years later the Grammar Arms Park estate (Bradfield Drive) was in the course of subdivision and development.

Eleanor Boody of Boody's general store of the 1930s contrasted her memory of Brassall, then known as Hungry Flats, as a two-house and one-store suburb, compared with modern Brassall which was 'full up'. The Brassall drive-in shopping centre at Hunter and Workshops Streets was opened in 1979 with one supermarket and 16 specialty shops, and extended in 1998 to two supermarkets and over 37 other shops. In addition to Boody's store there was Suttons Foundry at 142 Pine Mountain Road, an enterprise running from the 1930s to 1984, after which it was converted to the Heritage City Community Church (Sutton Park was named after the founder, Allan Sutton). There are another five churches in Brassall along with a Seventh Day Adventist primary school (1968). The Brassall Methodist church at the corner of Pommer and Parcell Streets was built in 1865 and put on its present site in 1889. Sutton Park has been supplemented by new recreation areas as subdivisions have spread, a notable example being a bush reserve and associated spaces on the site of the former quarry in the west of Brassall. In about 1990 Brassall was enlarged by absorbing the part of Raymonds Hill west of Waterworks Road.

FLOODS 2011

Brassall’s western boundary is Ironpot Creek and waters from two branches of the Mihi Creek converge near Ipswich High School. Both join the Bremer River, Brassall’s southern boundary. Several flood-prone lands adjoining the streams are open space, but the primary and high schools are not so fortunately placed next to Mihi Creek. Ipswich is well-known for flooding, and all three streams at Brassall behaved in 2011 as could have been predicted.

Brassall's census populations have been: