Brisbane is a large port city on the east coast of Australia. It is the capital of the state of Queensland — not the capital of Australia; that is Canberra — and it is the country’s third-largest city, after Sydney and Melbourne. It sits on a river that is also called the Brisbane. The city is named after Sir Thomas Brisbane, a British governor in the 1820s, when that part of Australia was still inside New South Wales. His family name was an old Scottish nickname for a man who got into fights and “broke bones”: from a Gaelic word for smash and an old English word for bone. Though actually, nobody in the city is thinking about broken bones when they say the name. In English you stress the first part and swallow the middle: BRIS-bən. Students sometimes mix this city up with Bristol in England; they are different places on different sides of the world.