Indooroopilly

We’re told it means “the gully of leeches”.

However the name Indooroopilly probably came from a very specific local warning, not from a general claim that the whole area was uniquely full of leeches.

Brisbane’s creeks and gullies would all have had leeches. Witton Creek, the gully running through the Indooroopilly area may have been a known leech-heavy spot.

During early settlement, European surveyors and selectors often asked local Turrbal and Jagera people for the names of creeks, camps, tracks and landmarks so they could record property boundaries. Indigenous place names thus spoken might refer to a camp, a resource, a danger or a feature at one point on a track, not a whole suburb-sized area.

So the likely story is simple enough. Local people warned settlers about leeches in the Witton Creek scrub. The word, possibly nyindur, was heard, mangled and written down phonetically by Europeans. Over time, that specific warning became Indooroopilly, the name of the whole district.