Boggo Road Gaol

For a century Boggo Road was Queensland’s main prison. The name came from the old track through “Boggo Scrub” south of the Brisbane River – perhaps for its mud in wet weather – and it stuck even after the road was renamed Annerley Road in 1903. The first cell block opened on 2 July 1883, built partly from the materials of the demolished Petrie Terrace gaol, and a separate red-brick women’s prison followed in 1903. In 1921 the women were moved out and that building became No. 2 Division for men.

Forty-two people were hanged in No. 1 Division, including Ellen Thompson, the only woman executed in Queensland, in 1887, and Ernest Austin in 1913 – the last execution in the state, which abolished the death penalty in 1922. The prison was rebuilt around its old core in the 1960s, and by the 1970s and 1980s it was notorious nationwide for hunger strikes, rooftop protests, riots and cells without sanitation, where men “slopped out” buckets every morning. People also died in custody there, among them Aboriginal prisoners whose deaths were examined by the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1987–91).

The prison closed in stages between 1989 and 1992, and most of it was demolished; the heritage-listed No. 2 Division survives. Ex-officers ran tours through the 1990s, the volunteer Boggo Road Gaol Historical Society took over from 2003, and after a long redevelopment the site reopened in 2012 under a commercial operator who added night ghost tours. It closed again in March 2022 for the Cross River Rail and village redevelopment, with no reopening date announced.

Boggo Road’s haunted reputation is unusual because the people who know its history best have worked to dismantle it. The historical society argues that its ghost stories were created for the tour trade and are in some cases demonstrably false. The most famous – that Ernest Austin laughed on the scaffold, promised to return and now haunts No. 2 Division – is contradicted by the reporters who watched him die, who recorded that he asked for forgiveness; by the fact that No. 2 Division was a women’s prison he never entered; and by former prisoners and officers who had never heard the tale. Relatives of people who died there opposed commercial ghost hunting, and in 2015 the Queensland Government banned ghost hunts at the site.

Ghost tours told of a laughing, demonic Ernest Austin appearing at cell doors, of disembodied laughter in the early morning, and of cold spots and voices in No. 2 Division. Some former officers and prisoners describe the odd strange experience, but none of them knew the Austin story before it was promoted by tour companies.

Stories were attached to the surviving No. 2 Division cellblocks and yards – not to No. 1 Division, where the executions actually took place and which was demolished decades ago.

Boggo Road features in Trent Dalton’s novel Boy Swallows Universe and its Netflix adaptation, in the song “Boggo Breakout” by The Chats, and in the TV shows The Amazing Race Australia and The Mole. The Boggo Road Gaol Historical Society’s “Mythbusting” pages are among the most thorough takedowns of a ghost-tour legend anywhere in Australia.