Australia’s Queensland is known as the sunshine state with half of its landmass in the tropics, however one of its oldest cities has long been closely connected with the cold. That includes an historic unrecognised record. I told a version of this story on West Bremer Radio.

Ipswich can be a cold place and its reputation has even been enforced through its mayors. In 1895, the alderman and future mayor Frederick Springall opened the coolest place in town, and that was the North Ipswich Ice Works. He sent ice away to frigid places like Toowoomba and Dalby. Interestingly, Fred’s wife had been the first white baby born in the Esk district, and the first christened at St Paul’s Church in Ipswich.

Ipswich horticulturalists have also been leaders in coldness. Fred Turley was the Ipswich curator of parks in 1934 when he witnessed the only snow ever to fall in Ipswich. It was Fred’s successor as curator who was responsible for Bunty which was Queensland’s first zoo crocodile that I told you about last week.

But it was the Big Chill in 1908 that had temperatures below freezing, taps frozen, and chaos across the city.

One night the thermometer at the Ipswich post office went down to minus 1.7 degrees Celsius. But the next night on Thursday the 25th of June 1908, a further slump in the mercury had weathermen talking about records. It went down to minus 3.9 degrees which was the coldest that officials had experienced there at the time.

The coldest ever official temperature in Ipswich today is minus 4.3 degrees which happened in June 1985, so this 1908 event was serious.

There were potentially dire consequences. One night soil man in North Ipswich had to break the ice in the water trough before his horse could get a drink.

And in gardens across the city, all kinds of flowers, Staghorn ferns, orange trees, and other plants were really badly affected. There was only one positive for gardeners, and that’s that the chill killed any scale pests on the plants.

The two nurseries in Ipswich suffered the worst. Mr. William Marsh of Thorn Street reported that all of the twenty-seven taps at his Ipswich Nursery were frozen, and that his roses had never been damaged as badly. He could get only two blooms out of the whole of the nursery. It was so cold that even at midday, Mr. Marsh still had ice half-an-inch thick.

He later died at the nursery which had become one of the foremost in Queensland. As well-known as William Marsh was, it was his father John who had been even more famous for the quality of his melons.

The other nursery in Ipswich was also devastated. It was at Mr. Alexander Butchart’s Milford Nursery near Queen’s Park that not a single rose bloom survived. Mr. Butchart was the greatest flower lover in Ipswich history. After his death the “Alexander Butchart Pavilion” was opened at the showgrounds, and the Butchart Memorial, which is a marble tablet, was unveiled by none other than the governor Sir Leslie Wilson. So next time you go to the show, ask about the Butchart memorials and remember the devastating freeze of 1908.

But the most amazing thing to come out of the Big Chill happened not far away, at the Franklyn Vale homestead (pictured at top of the page) at Grandchester. That’s where Mr. Arthur Mort recorded inside the house a temperature even colder of minus 5.6 degrees.

The lowest officially recorded temperature in Queensland today is minus 10.6 degrees in Warwick and Stanthorpe in the 1960s.

But in 1908, Mr. Mort actually recorded on the flat next to the homestead an incredible temperature of minus 11.1 degrees, which is half-a-degree colder than even the state record today.

His cold, single-storeyed weatherboard home was built in the early 1870s and is still there to this day, and still owned by the same family. One of the Mort family in 1861 even established at Darling Harbour in Sydney the first freezing works in the world.

Ipswich’s connection to the cold has been long-established, even though its unofficial Queensland record from one hundred and fifteen years ago remains unrecognised.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO A VERSION OF THIS STORY TOLD LIVE ON RADIO.

Photo credits:
Franklyn Vale Homestead, 1992 – Wikipedia Commons.
Frederick George Springall, Ipswich Mayor, 1915 – Picture Ipswich.
Marshs Nursery, Ipswich, 1904 – Picture Ipswich.
Alexander Butchart – Queensland Times, Ipswich, 17th August 1935, page 8.