Bowen Park, Brisbane

Bowen Park is a heritage-listed park of 17,740 m² at O'Connell Terrace (corner of Bowen Bridge Road), Bowen Hills, City of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. It was built from 1863 to 1950s. It was also known as the Acclimatisation Society Gardens. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 26 February 1999.HistoryBowen Park is a 1.774 hectare remnant of a parcel of land of almost forty acres (160,000m²) bordered by O'Connell Terrace, Bowen Bridge Road, Gregory Terrace and Brooke Street. The park is important for its survival and continued use since 1863 as a park for public pleasure in inner-city Brisbane, an area under pressure to accommodate increased urban development and consolidation. The Queensland Government granted land to the Queensland Acclimatisation Society (QAS) in two parcels in 1863 and 1866, this site was then well out of town on the edge of development and had been worked as a brickfield. Part of this land lay along the watercourse of York's Hollow and the remainder was remnant bushland and brickworks. The site was not ideal for establishing a garden, the soil being of poor quality and rocky in parts, and required substantial reclamation work to form the gardens.The society named the Gardens after George Bowen, the Governor of Queensland and their patron. Over the years parts of the land were progressively leased, sold and resumed for other purposes, resulting in only 17,740m² (4.383 acres) remaining by 1955 in the north-western corner of the original site (on the corner of O'Connell Terrace and Bowen Bridge Road).