While sailing up
Queensland’s east coast, Lieutenant
James Cook sighted a group of mountains on the coastal plain of today’s
Sunshine Coast, and named them the
Glass House Mountains after the glass furnaces in
Yorkshire. Aboriginal people had long used this area as a meeting place for
ceremonies, trading, and gatherings. Cook first landed in Queensland at Round Hill (now known as
Seventeen Seventy) on 24 May 1770. The area around Mackay began to be colonised in 1860, and, according to George Bridgeman, During the eight or ten years which followed, about one-half of the aboriginal population was either shot down by the
Native Mounted Police and their officers, or perished from introduced loathsome diseases before unknown. Bridgeman named the Barada (Toolginburra) as one of the four Mackay tribes that suffered from this decimation, part of the
Australian frontier wars occurring throughout the colonies. Though the "dispersal" shootings are thought to have accounted for the majority of deaths, a
measles epidemic struck the survivors in 1876, drastically reducing their numbers, and, according to one estimation, the remnants of the original people in 1880 amounted to no more than 100 people, with 80 evenly divided between men and women, and the remainder their children. ==Alternative names==