Teneriffe

About this audio guide

This guide to Teneriffe House on Teneriffe Hill in Brisbane follows James Gibbon, the nineteenth-century land speculator who named the whole suburb after a mountain he once glimpsed from a ship and built this grand house in eighteen sixty-five. It traces his rise in the colony and two decades in Queensland's Legislative Council, and the sudden departure for England that left his seat behind him strangely quiet. Listen from the fence line, where the house's wide verandahs still frame the hill he claimed as his own.