John Finnegan

Who is John Finnegan?

John Finnegan, a convict of the colony of New South Wales, was one of four men who set off on a timber getting mission from Sydney bound for Illawarra in 1823. The men were caught in a severe storm and driven north 728 km to Moreton Island off the coast of Brisbane, becoming the first Europeans to live in the area and the first to discover the Brisbane River.

Prior to this a number of earlier explorers had sailed the Moreton Bay area. Most notable was Matthew Flinders who spent 15 days in the general vicinity during his 1799 expedition from Port Jackson to Hervey Bay. Due to the difficulty of finding coastal rivers by seaward exploration, none of these explorers became aware of the existence of the Brisbane River. Later in 1823, when the Surveyor General, John Oxley, was commissioned by Governor Brisbane to find sites for further penal settlements, he made a trip to the Moreton Bay area. If not for a chance meeting with one of Finnegan’s surviving partners, Thomas Pamphlett, and the men telling him of a large freshwater river they had stumbled across some months earlier, Oxley may never have made the exploration that led to the establishment of Brisbane Town some years later.