The naming of Fig Tree Pocket

IThe suburb of Fig Tree Pocket was named after a huge fig tree that grew near the lagoon up until the late 1800s.    

In 1866 an extraordinary photo of the trunk of the tree with a young man standing in front of it was taken by Mr. G. W. Sweet, a photographer of South Brisbane. He sent the photo to the newspaper The Brisbane Courier, which reported that it was ‘an immense figtree, which is to be seen in the scrub fringing the Brisbane River.’  

It was probably the first picture of the kind taken in the new colony.

The photographer advised the newspaper, that if the immense buttresses peculiar to the fig tree were covered over, the ‘gigantic subject of the photograph would afford cover to nearly four hundred people’.  

In 1866, the Surveyor General instructed the surveyor, Henry Charles Rawnsley, to survey the pocket into farms of 15 to 30 acre lots and he was asked to reserve some land on which stands this ‘remarkable fig tree’. 

Rawnsley submitted the survey plans some months later with a 4-acre reserve around the tree.  

Tt has been estimated  that the tree would have been a massive 50 metres tall.

Ten years later the tree was gone.  It is probably it died for clearing the surrounding scrub and perhaps local grass fires… or maybe floods or the excavation of sand undermined the tree.

The Fig Tree Reserve is now the Fig Tree Pocket Riverside Reserve at the river end of Fig Tree Pocket Road.