Love, Loss, and Legacy at Breakfast Creek

In 1865 heartbreak at the original Breakfast Creek Hotel in Brisbane was, in a strange way, a good thing for history. I told a version of this story on West Bremer Radio.

That same year one hundred and forty-nine years ago, a remarkable story arose of a young couple who eloped from one hundred and sixty kilometres away in Warwick. The mystery remains to this day as to the couple’s true identity. It could have been a fourteen-year-old heiress and her horse-breaking, music teaching school master.

But as we know, there’s love and heartbreak everywhere, and the original Breakfast Creek Hotel was no different.

The current Breakfast Creek Hotel was built in 1889, but there was another one before that which was an old wooden one less than a hundred meters up the road.

It was in August 1865 – shortly after the eloping was going on in Warwick – that James Foley O’Neil came to town and his sad story was told in Ipswich and elsewhere.

O’Neill was the licensee of the Breakfast Creek Hotel. Just one week earlier, his wife Ellen had died at the hotel aged just thirty-fine years. Ellen had left in possession of their daughter £400, and a quantity of jewellery. The cash was the equivalent of more than half-a-million dollars today.

Shortly afterwards, the girl, who was about fifteen years of age, along with the valuables, was nowhere to be found. O’Neil believed that she had eloped with a lover smitten by her golden, and valuable, charms.

The events ruined him, but remarkably became responsible for the grand history on display today.

You see, O’Neil abandoned the hotel and it fell into disrepair and was eventually demolished. The area still needed a hotel, and so it was in 1889 that the current Breakfast Creek Hotel was built by the mayor of Brisbane, William Galloway.

That second Breakfast Creek Hotel is the one that stands today and is an historic and architectural favourite for passers-by.

If it wasn’t for the misfortune of the licensee O’Neil with his wife’s premature death and the daughter’s rich elopement, the historic hotel today may not exist at all.

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