Becoming A City: Economy

In the 1900s and 1910s, industries were progressing steadily and the city and surrounding district had several large and successful businesses including foundries, joineries, sawmills, brick and pottery works, meatworks and butter factories. On the north side of the river, huge new railway workshops had started near The Terrace, but the site proved too restrictive and a new location was selected on the old rifle range immediately to the north. Several new buildings were constructed in the 1880s but the depression of the early 1890s halted the work. Two explosions in locomotive boilers in 1899 alerted the government to the fact that workshops facilities had been badly neglected and as the new century started, the building program recommenced.

Ipswich at this time also had one woollen mill, operating since 1877, and the only cotton mill in Australia, built in 1892 but not operating at that time. It had been hampered by lack of local cotton and at one stage, had been forced to import cotton from India.

In the surrounding country areas, dairying was the main industry but all rural enterprises received a major setback in the great drought of 1902-1904. So serious was its effects that the Government declared a special holiday to allow people to attend a “Day of Humiliation and Prayers for Rain”. Sugar was grown in the Marburg area, and processed at a mill at “Woodlands”. Other less usual crops included pineapples, grown at Marburg and Pine Mountain.

On the day that Ipswich was proclaimed a city, it was suggested that Ipswich should have a local Chamber of Commerce.  Local business people consulted their counterparts in Brisbane and in 1906, a Chamber was formed with Ambrose Foote as president, Mayor F. Goleby as vice-president and 45 members. The Chamber saw the future of Ipswich “associated with the prosperity of the surrounding districts” and its early efforts appear to have looked outside the city, hoping that Ipswich would benefit from being the centre of a larger transport network.