Rosslea, a residential suburb, is four km south-west of central Townsville.
It was an outlying area of the Hermit Park Estate by the 1880s, and in the 1890s was itself a speculative estate, probably comprising the land between Queens Road and the Ross River. The first significant title holder, other than John Deane the promoter of the Rosslea estate, was the Townsville Golf Club in the 1920s. Its golf course overlooks a bend in the Ross River.
There are several later interwar high-set houses in Rosslea, along with considerable numbers of postwar houses, town houses and units. The last-mentioned cluster around the golf course. Another cluster of buildings is the procession of motels along Bowen Road, the main route into central Townsville.
Rosslea's census populations have been:
| Census Date | Population |
|---|---|
| 1986 | 1120 |
| 1991 | 1834 |
| 2001 | *2047 |
| 2006 | 1444 |
| 2011 | 1600 |
