Booral is a locality within the Hervey Bay City area, 14 km south-east of Pialba and 40 km south of Maryborough. The name 'Booral' is believed to derive either from 'Beiral', the name of the sky god of the local Badjala Aboriginal people, or their word 'burrall', meaning 'place of shell mounds'. A Maryborough business man, E.T. Aldridge, took up a leasehold that he named Booral Homestead in the 1850s.
Located on the coast, Booral overlooks the Great Sandy Strait toward Fraser Island, and was an outlying farming area. An industrial estate was established, capitalising on Booral's position on the fringe of the Hervey Bay settlement, and residential development was largely confined to low-density acreage settlements. Hervey Bay's astonishing population growth in the 1990s sparked suburban estate subdivisions, in turn increasing Booral's residential population. It has an active Community Association concerned with foreshore management and the conservation of wildlife.
Businesses operating in the industrial estate include an aquaculture hatchery.
Booral's census populations have been:
| Census Date | Population |
|---|---|
| 1996 | 1159 |
| 2001 | 1148 |
| 2006 | 1365 |
| 2011 | 1449 |
