Burbank, a rural/residential suburb, is 18 km south-east of central Brisbane. Its eastern boundary is Tingalpa Creek, also a boundary between Brisbane and Redland councils. The area was known as Upper Tingalpa until 1976.
It was named after a surveyor, Alfred Burbank, who settled in the area in 1890. He was chair of the Tingalpa divisional board, and a Methodist church and school were built on his land in Wildsoet Street. His son was active in the district in the 1910s-30s. Upper Tingalpa was a farming, dairying and timber-cutting district, and extensive stands of timber remained when the area was named Burbank and rural/residential acreages were sold off in the 1970s.
About half of Burbank is occupied by the Tingalpa Reservoir (1967) and a conservation park/bushland reserve. The reserve is a refuge for numerous Australian mammals, including a large koala population. Burbank has no local state school, but Sinai College, a co-educational P-7 Jewish school, was opened in 1990.
Some landholders entered into a voluntary conservation agreement, with a binding legal covenant, to protect local forests and timber in 2008.