Boundary Street in Brisbane’s West End is home to an array of vintage stores, restaurants and cafés. But in the 1800s, Boundary Street was used as a line to separate Indigenous Australian people from the other inhabitants of Brisbane.

After 4pm and on Sundays, Indigenous Australian people were forced to vacate the town centre beyond the boundary posts. Police troopers patrolled the streets and if any of the banished disobeyed, they were whipped and beaten.

Debate over whether the street should be renamed has persisted for years. Some say the name should remain to force Queensland to front up to its racist history, and others say it’s a painful reminder that should be replaced with a new name to move towards a more equal and inclusive future.

When asked for comment, a representative for Greens MP for South Brisbane Amy MacMahon said that an Indigenous elder fought for years to keep the name. “Uncle Sam Watson fought to keep Boundary Street’s name as a reminder of the crimes done against First Nations people in this city,” he said.

In a 2018 speech to the House of Representatives, former Longman MP Susan Lamb referred to Boundary Street when condemning the previous harmful policies inflicted upon Indigenous Australian people. “While it may be a major road in Brisbane’s south, it carries a really shameful history,” she said. “This racist policy has long since been abolished, thank goodness, but the street name remains as a reminder of our city’s shameful past.”

It may be the most publicised, but Boundary Street is not the only place in Queensland with a long and dark history of segregating Indigenous Australians.

In 1897, the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act was passed by the Queensland Government, which was instrumental in a major law directed at First Nations people in Queensland. Under the guise of protecting them from the ravages of disease and crime, this Act allowed First Nations people to be forcibly removed by designated “protectors”.

Reserves and missions were established in places such as Cherbourg and Woorabinda, and were designed to limit the reproduction of part-Aboriginal offspring and separate “unproductive and problematic” Indigenous Australians. From 1914, thousands of Indigenous Australians were sent to Palm Island, a place used as a “prison camp” for “troublemakers”.

Former Herbert MP Cathy O’Toole said in Parliament that the National Day of Apology was very important to the First Nations people in her electorate due to the troubling history of Palm Island. “[Palm Island] is an incredibly diverse community of approximately 47 language groups… people from communities across the state of Queensland who were forcibly moved to Palm Island,” she said. “Many of those men came in chains, shackled around the neck, the hands and the feet.”

Like Boundary Street, Mango Avenue on Palm Island was declared out of bounds for Indigenous Australians. Today, the Palm Island Aboriginal Shire Council has put in place protocols that should be followed when living on or visiting the island, to pay respect to its history and culture.

Bogimbah Creek Reserve was established in 1897, to segregate, control and “protect” the Butchulla people of the Wide Bay region. According to an issue of Queensland Country Life newspaper from June 1902, the “dirty, ragged and diseased remnants of the old Wide Bay tribes” were removed to the mission to save them from starvation and opium and alcohol addiction. Though, according to the Brisbane Times, the conditions at the mission were said to be appalling, with many dying of illness and malnutrition.

A University of the Sunshine Coast research team discovered around 70 graves near the reserve site in 2014. After the mission was abandoned in 1904, the Queensland Government Department of Environment and Science says many of the inhabitants were sent to various missions across the state, including Yarrabah Mission.

Of the all the missions in Queensland, Yarrabah Mission was the largest. The Yarrabah Aboriginal Shire Council says that after its establishment in 1900, 969 removals were recorded and over 43 different tribal groups were represented at the mission by 1972.

A mission at Woorabinda was established in 1926. Between 1927 and 1946, there were 575 documented removals of Indigenous Australians to the mission. Then, between 1944 and 1970, an additional 630 removals were recorded. Disease outbreaks were a common occurrence, as well as poor sanitary and dietary conditions.

In 2015, the Queensland Government made a compensation offer to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who suffered under decades of control by the Protection Acts. The Reparations Scheme for stolen wages and savings offer totalled $21 million, and those directly affected by the Protection Acts and their descendants were able to claim payments of up to $9200.

A 2018 report by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimated that First Nations individuals that were removed from their families experienced a range of adverse outcomes at a rate higher than those who had not been removed. Those that had been removed experienced a higher likelihood of being incarcerated in the past five years and being more likely to have poor general health.

Former Greens senator Rachel Siewert acknowledged the findings of the report and called for further compensation to be made on a national level in a motion to Parliament. “I move that the Senate urges the Federal Government to urgently address the effects of unresolved intergenerational trauma and implement a national reparations scheme for survivors of The Stolen Generation and their families,” she said.

As Australia attempts to atone for its dark history, Boundary Street currently retains its name, as a reminder of the atrocities that the First Nations people experienced.

This article is part of a larger project called Where What Why. You can find the whole collection of stories about places and their names here.