Austral Motors Building is a heritage-listed former automobile showroom at 95 Boundary Street, Fortitude Valley, City of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. It was designed by Lange Leopold Powell and George Gerald Hutton and built from 1923 to 1925 by Blair Cunningham. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 11 April 2005.
History
The former Austral Motors Building, which closes the vista at the end of Upper Adelaide Street, Petrie Bight, is located on the Fortitude Valley side of Boundary Street at the northern end of the Brisbane central business district. Constructed in 1924–6 for the Austral Motors Company, it has a close association with the 20th century interwar re-development of the Petrie Bight area as an important warehousing precinct and motor vehicle servicing and distribution district.
Petrie Bight is a sharp curve in the Brisbane River at the northern end of the Town Reach. The name is derived from the association of the area with early Brisbane builder Andrew Petrie, who established his workshop and residence at the corner of Wharf and Queen Streets.
Early Petrie Bight land use
Surveyor Henry Wade, on his 1844 Map of the Environs of Brisbane Town, identified the Petrie's Bight area south of Boundary Street and east of Queen Street as "Reserved for Dry Dock". Surveyor Galloway did the same on his 1856 Plan of the Suggested Extension of the Town of Brisbane. At this time the surrounding area was sparsely occupied, with Andrew Petrie's house and factory at the corner of Wharf and Queen Streets; Dr Hobbs' house (now St John's Deanery) a little further north in Adelaide Street; the original Customs House in Queen Street, beside the Brisbane River; and a ferry jetty just north of the Customs Houses.
A map of Brisbane Town showing the new town boundaries no longer labelled Petrie's Bight as a reserve for a dry dock (no dry dock was ever established there), but the site remained unsurveyed Government land. An early track (the northern end of Queen Street) ran through this land, branching off in three directions to New Farm, Fortitude Valley and the northwest end of Spring Hollow.
Under the provisions of the Brisbane Gas Company Bill 1864 the Queensland Government granted to the Company a site bounded by what are now Ann, Boundary and Macrossan streets and a frontage to the Brisbane River, as the site for Brisbane's first gas works. This was the northern half of the Government land at Petrie's Bight. Gas production commenced there in 1865, providing the Brisbane Municipal Council with a regular supply of gas for street lighting. By the early 1870s the demand for gas for domestic consumption was outstripping supply, and in the mid-1870s a second gasometer was constructed on the site. In 1873 the Brisbane Gas Company gained a formal deed of grant to the Petrie's Bight land, an area of , which the Company had purchased from the Government in May 1873 for .
An April 1873 a survey plan titled Survey of Site of Gas Works and Adjacent Crown Land Shewing Road Through Same indicates that by this date the gas works site was fenced along the entire length of its land boundaries, but that through this the government had just surveyed a wide road between Macrossan and Boundary streets, which later became an extension of Adelaide Street. Photographs from the 1860s and early 1870s show a tall paling fence around the perimeter of the gas works, prohibiting public access. Early Brisbane resident Victor Drury, writing in The Courier-Mail in 1939, recalled: "When Adelaide Street was extended to Boundary Street, there were turnstiles there, and only pedestrians could use the path as a short cut to Queen Street."
River wharfage
In the early 1840s wharfage in Brisbane was concentrated along the South Brisbane Reach of the Brisbane River, but within a decade had extended to the Town Reach further downstream, which soon rivalled South Brisbane in terms of shipping activity. An 1849 decision to locate Brisbane's first purpose-built Customs House at the northern end of the Town Reach acted as the impetus for the development of wharves on this part of the river. The Commissariat Store below William Street, which had served as Brisbane's first customs facility, was replaced in 1850 by a new customs building on the site of the present Customs House, Brisbane in Queen Street, at Petrie's Bight. (This in turn was replaced in 1886-89 by the current building.) During the 1850s and 1860s, a number of shipping companies and private investors constructed wharves and warehouses between the Customs House and Alice Street, near the City Botanic Gardens.