Marburg
Postcode: 4346
Marburg is the name of a small township of 1200 inhabitants located 60 km west of Brisbane, the capital of the State of Queensland, Australia. It is a township in the City of Ipswich.
German settlers arrived in the region around the 1860s. The story goes that, when the station master of the nearby Walloon railway station asked the settlers were they lived, the settlers responded with ‘ober dar’. He felt that ‘ober dar’ should have a proper name and since he had read an article about a town in Germany called ‘Marburg’ he decided to register their produce as coming from ‘Marburg’. The settlers liked this solution and the name stuck.
The timber, sugar cane and dairy industries put Marburg on its feet. While Marburg in 1868 was a wilderness, in 1900 Marburg had a courthouse, police barracks, a post office, two hotels, five churches, a State school, a School of Arts, several stores, a blacksmith, a butter factory, a sugar factory and a rum distillery. At that time nearly 80 percent of Marburg’s population came from Germany or was of German descent.
Marburg grew rapidly in the first half of the twentieth century, as the main road from Brisbane to Toowoomba passed through the town’s centre. Marburg became popular as a stopover for travellers.