Booroodabin, the Breakfast Creek area, has a layered history. With several large Aboriginal camps, tournament grounds, wells and corroboree grounds, it attracted the attention of English explorer John Oxley, who planned to establish a settlement in the vicinity.

The creek itself was home to a large-scale fishery where Aboriginal people used hand nets and a complex set of weirs to catch fish with the turning tides. The harvest was so abundant that Aboriginal people supplied Brisbane with the bulk of its fish from here between the 1830s and 1860s. The creek was also the site of an Aboriginal shipworm farm, where logs of she-oak were piled up to attract edible worms, which had the added effect of attracting more fish to the area.

Newstead House overlooks Breakfast Creek. First built in 1846, it has been the residence of many affluent Brisbane families and is now a historic house museum, serving as a window into upper class colonial life.

In Noel McKenna’s Gondola, Brisbane River (2013), a gondola drifts past Newstead House and its surrounding palm trees, creating an absurd contrast between the subtropical Brisbane landscape and the iconic Venetian vessel.

Much of Brisbane’s early Cantonese community settled in the Breakfast Creek area, establishing market gardens and the Temple of the Holy Triad, which is now heritage listed. Margaret Olley captured another of the suburb’s icons in her painting Breakfast Creek Hotel (1947), a pub built in 1889 and which has barely changed since she painted it in 1947. However, other aspects of Breakfast Creek’s built landscape continue to evolve. The most recent addition is the Breakfast Creek Lifestyle Precinct, and a planned green bridge is also due to open in 2023, spanning Breakfast Creek between Newstead Park and Kingsford Smith Drive.