Pallara is a suburb of Brisbane between the Oxley and Blunder Creeks. It is contiguous to several fully subdivided residential suburbs but retains its nineteenth century farmlet allotments. It is 17 km south of central Brisbane. The name is reportedly an Aboriginal word, not from local languages, suggesting flat country.
In 1892 a large part of Pallara was subdivided for ten-acre farmlets and marketed as the Mildura Estate. (The closer-settlement citrus farms in Mildura, Victoria, had begun four years before.) The farmlets were for fruit-growing, which was often found with dairying in the local Yeerongpilly Shire which stretched from Rocklea to Waterford.
Pallara State primary school, known as the Ritchie Road School, was opened in 1959. At that time the area was known as Oxley South. In 2007 the primary school's enrolment was 180.
In 2013 the State government announced the building of a new primary school at Pallara as part of 10 new schools to be built in high-growth areas under a private-public partnership model, with the private companies responsible for maintaining the school for up to 30 years.
To the north of Pallara, along Gooderham Road, the Brisbane City Council had a large industrial and municipal waste-disposal site, operative from the 1950s to the 1990s. The soil and groundwater contamination has required a lengthy clean-up, and the site is identified as the Willawong Remediation Project. Pallara parkland, a former night-soil dumping site, is to the south-east of the Willawong Remediation Project.
Pallara and the Oxley flood plain are part of the Oxley Wedge, linking green space at Karawatha Forest and Parkinson Bushland to semi-rural land adjoining Rocklea and Corinda. The Oxley Creek Catchment Association is an advocate for the Oxley Wedge and the creek's habitat.
The industrial suburb of Heathwood is on the Logan Motorway, immediately south of Pallara. (Street directories show a residential area on Stapylton Road, north of the motorway, as part of Heathwood, but the census put it with Pallara.) Heathwood was formally named in 1970. Its main industrial uses are transport.
Census populations have been: