History of Murphy's Creek
The traditional aborigines of the area were the Kitabel people who spoke the Yuggera dialect. They called the area Tamamareen, meaning “where the fishing nets were burnt in a grass fire”.
The explorer Alan Cunningham was the first recorded pioneer, camping at Lockyer siding on the 25th June 1829. The locality became known by the early surveyors as Fingal. However in 1840 Patrick Leslie, along with his freed servant Peter Duffy Murphy, happened upon the area whilst looking for a crossing over the Range. They later pastured sheep and cattle in the area using the water from the creek, under the watch of a shepherd named Murphy. The area became known by the station managers as Murphy's Creek, a name which has by popular use, supplanted the name of Fingal.
The community of Murphy's Creek was largely established during the construction of the Toowoomba Range Railway Crossing in the 1860’s. At the time this crossing represented a great engineering challenge and its construction was a huge commitment for the fledgling state of Queensland. Rail workers were recruited from all over the world. An eyewitness in 1865 described Murphy's Creek as being “a seething mass of tents, humpies, salons and sly grog-shops.”