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Tivoli
North across the Bremer River, various mines were opened from the 1850s onwards between North Ipswich and Tivoli. This bushland area, which was subdivided into farm allotments in 1861 and mostly sold by 1863, benefited from the renewed interest in coal mining due to railway development.
Ipswich businessmen John Robinson and Harry Hooper financed and named the old Tivoli pit which operated from 1866 until the early 1880s. This name was thereafter applied to the whole seam and surrounding suburbs. The place name, which has connotations of Copenhagen's pleasure-ground and Rome's d'Este Villa, evidently derived from a middle name used by the Hooper family. The original Mr. Hooper's son was named Henry Tivoli Hooper and his grandson was Frederick Tivoli Hooper.
The success of the Old Tivoli Mine led to numerous coal mining ventures in the area, especially those by John Wright, Robert Archibald, James Gulland, the Stafford Brothers, the Bells and the Moffats. These endeavours were important in supplying the Mount Crosby Pumping Station, Ipswich Pumping Station, Queensland Railways and several other works. Consequently Tivoli was riddled with pits, from where coal was transported to the riverside by a tramway.
During the late nineteenth century, other employment included the brickworks at Moores Pocket (c1893) and a sawmill at Waterstown. John Quay, a Chinese man, grew vegetables in the vicinity, while several families including the Wardel, Kain, Brockie, Buckley and Hill, lived in slab timber cottages on Tivoli Hill. Growing cotton and running cattle were other early occupations in the area.
Though the Welsh were strongly represented, the population was mixed in origin. In 1911, during a spate of Russian immigration to Queensland, at least four families settled in the Tivoli area.
Centred around Mt Crosby Road, the Tivoli facilities included a Congregational Church hall, which was built in 1875.
There a pitman with some teaching experience who taught night school to twenty one male pupils whose ages ranged from eleven to twenty-two. Two years later the Tivoli Provisional School was opened and land was bought to build a state school. The one-roomed school and four roomed teacher's residence eventuated in 1881. During the Second World War the school housed American airmen for a short period, who manned a searchlight sited behind the tennis court, and air-raid trenches were dug nearby. The Principal from 1954 to 1964 recalled that the school residence was a quaint structure with shingles under the iron roof; also that during most winters, bushfires sweeping up the western boundary played havoc in the area.
References (offline)Expanded Ipswich Heritage Study (1997)
Tivoli Hill Horse Trough, Tantivy Street, and Moores Pocket Road, (corner of), Tivoli, Ipswich, 2024
