Buccan is a low density semi-rural suburb with larger acreage bushland type blocks. Buccan does not have a formalised town centre or shopping facilities with its residents relying on Logan Village, Waterford and Beenleigh to access such services. Buccan is home to the Buccan Conservation Park, a nature conservation area managed by the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service.
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Dairying was also an important farm industry. Buccan railway station () was on the disused Beaudesert railway line from Bethania to Beaudesert. The line opened on 21 September 1885. Once part of the Shire of Beaudesert, Buccan became part of Logan City in the local government amalgamations of 2008.
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Buccan or Boucan is the native South American and Caribbean nameDiccionario de Etimologías for a wooden framework or hurdle on which meat was slow-roasted or smoked over a fire. Spaniards called the same process "barbacoa", later "barbecue".Oxford English Dictionary The term "buccaneer" for pirates or privateers, is said to be derived from buccan. In the Caribbean, seafarers used the wooden frames for smoking meat, preferably Pork.
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Early European settlers in Buccan were James Williamson and his brother-in-law Mr A. Fraser who selected land south of Bethania in about 1863. They attempted to grow cotton but had problems with bollworm. However, sugar cane was successfully grown in the district. One of the largest sugar cane plantations in the area was on the land which is Newstead Park today (beside the Logan River).
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The term buccaneer was taken from the Spanish bucanero and derives from the Caribbean Arawak word buccan, a wooden frame on which Tainos and Caribs slowly roasted or smoked meat, commonly manatee. From it derived the French word boucane and hence the name boucanier for French hunters who used such frames to smoke meat from feral cattle and pigs on Hispaniola. English colonists anglicised the word boucanier to buccaneer.
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He attended high school for two years, however, during the Great Depression, he left formal schooling to help his struggling family. He worked firstly for one of his sisters, Lillian (Lil), and her husband, Edward (Ted) Wendt, on their farm at nearby Buccan, and again at Murgon when they moved to a much larger farm. As a teenager, the farm work proved lonely and he returned home and, before its closure in 1934, worked as an apprentice in the blacksmith's shop at the nearby Kingston Gold Mine. Meanwhile, another of his sisters, Martha (Mattie), and her husband, Stanley Middleton, working as a Patrol Officer, were living in Papua New Guinea.
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The Reserve then encompassed the districts of Loganlea, Waterford, Logan Reserve, Logan Village, Buccan, Chambers Flat, Stockleigh and parts of Maclean (now North Maclean and South Maclean) and Park Ridge. On 18 October 1864, a further 8,000 acres extension to the Logan Agricultural Reserve was proclaimed - north of the Logan River, around Loganholme. Many of the settlers who first took up land on the Logan Agricultural Reserve in the 1860s were Irish immigrants who had come to Queensland under the auspices of the Queensland Immigration Society, established in 1861 by the Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane, James Quinn. Between 1862 and 1865 approximately 6,000 Irish were encouraged to emigrate to Queensland under this scheme.
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