Our West End is a blog about the inner city suburbs of West End, Highgate Hill, Hill End, South Brisbane and Dutton Park, generally refered to as the West End community. These suburbs all make up a peninsula on the Brisbane River, immediately to the South-West of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

This peninsula is also known as Kurilpa – the local Aboriginal word meaning place of water rats. Our West End acknowledges the traditional owners (Aboriginal owners) of the area, the Turrbal and Jagera clans of the greater Gurrinindanami dance of South East Queensland and Northern New South Wales.

In the last 150 years the peninsula has undergone constant change. Firstly as the rainforest and flood plains were cleared and developed for timber and market gardens to support the new British colony, then to an industrial and wharf area supporting the growing Brisbane town, to a working class, Aboriginal and migrant community and then in the last 20 years it has become a gentrified affluent community with a significant scattering of its traditional less affluent population. West End is a Brisbane centre for homeless people with several homeless camps and welfare agencies as well as many hostels for the homeless, mentally ill and transient.

West End is also full of artists, writers, political activists and assorted ratbags, some of whom have conspired to produce this blog to display, record and preserve some of the stories, images and history of our community – the good and the bad alike.

We are committed to free speech, a pillar of West end rat-baggery. All articles are open to comment and questioning and we encourage readers to do this. We reserve the right to delete comments but will be very reluctant to do so.