Names
Australian Placenames of German Background
Brunswick (Brunswick Junction), Western Australia
The town of Brunswick is about 20 km north-east of Bunbury. The town was named after the nearby river, which John Septimus Roe, the first surveyor-general in the colony of Western Australia, found in 1830. The name Brunswick (the English form of the German name Braunschweig) was most likely chosen by Governor Stirling (the Western Australian colony's first governor) - it is thought that he named the Brunswick River after Frederick William, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel), nicknamed "The Black Duke". During one part of the Napoleonic wars this duke and his unit served as part of the British Army, and he met the British navy captain James Stirling. Stirling (later the governor of Western Australia) was tasked with taking the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel to the Netherlands in his warship HMS Brazen in 1813.
You can read more about the German background to the place name Brunswick here.
City name sign on the edge of Braunschweig (Brunswick), Germany
◀ Placenames in the Northern Territory & Western Australia...
♦ References:
1. Brunswick Junction, in History of country town names. At Landgate - Western Australia's land information authority (page archived on the 26th October 2009 at the Internet Archive)
2. Multhoff, Robert F. (1961). "Friedrich Wilhelm" in: Neue Deutsche Biographie 5, p. 502 [Online version URL: <www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd118703242.html#ndbcontent>]