A Brief History of Moreton Bay

by Peter Ludlow

The Aboriginal settlement of the Moreton Bay area predates the Bay itself. 15,000+ years ago Aboriginal tribes roamed the area’s hills and plains. Then, after the last ice age 12000 to 8000 years ago with the melting of the Polar ice the sea level rose to form what is now known as Moreton Bay. The former hill tops became the inner islands while northbound coastal currents deposited sand to form the outer protective islands of Moreton and Stradbroke. The Aborigines continued to populate these, unmolested through unrecorded eons until the sporadic visitations of foreign seamen

 One can only imagine their surprise at seeing the masses of white canvas sails on these huge, square rigged ships. And when Cook sailed past in 1770 they little knew that he was giving a name to their still unwritten land: Morton Bay XE "Morton Bay"  (after James Douglas, 14th Earl of Morton , and misspelled by later cartographers as Moreton Bay).

Matthew Flinders in 1799 made the first recorded contact with the Bay’s indigenous people when he landed at Bribie Island and was met by a group of aborigines.  A short attempt at trading only heightened the tension and mistrust between the two groups and ended with a spear being thrown and a musket fired in return. The spot of this encounter was named Skirmish Point  by Flinders, and symbolises much of the early encounters between the indigenous people and the European newcomers.

For come they did when John Oxley arrived in 1824 with a group of convicts to set up a settlement at Redcliffe Point.  The following year it was moved to a site on the Brisbane River and continued as a convict settlement until 1839. From 1842, when Moreton Bay was thrown open to free settlement, immigrants arrived in their droves.  Life for the indigenous people would never be the same.

However, it was the taking of the aborigines’ land that must surely have been their greatest downfall. Mr Tripcony: ‘They got used to coming for rations, but of course they could always live on what they caught or found for themselves. When they lived by hunting, though, they had to be always moving on.’ Removing their hunting grounds, then, made the Aborigines even more dependent on the Europeans for their livelihood.  And with each step towards ‘civilisation’ they became one more step removed from their Nature Mother, one more step away from their culture, and their reason for existence.

IMMIGRATION

Having served as one of Australia’s receptacles for Britain’s overcrowded prisons, Moreton Bay next became a destination for many of Europe’s dispossessed. Fleeing from wars, religious persecution, and economic hardship, tens of thousands of immigrants, notably from Britain and Germany, set off to try to make a better life in a new country, Australia. But as well as their hopes they also brought their diseases such as smallpox, cholera, and typhoid, that could ravage whole communities. The aborigines, in particular, were vulnerable and their lack of immunity contributed significantly to their decline.

So quarantine stations were set up to house passengers and crews of infected ships. Dunwich became Moreton Bay’s quarantine station in 1850 with the ill-fated “Emigrant ” its first caller.

Later, St Helena was developed as a quarantine station but on completion of the buildings in 1866, the Government had a change of heart and converted it into a prison.  A new site for the quarantine station was later found at Peel Island , with nearby Bird Island its tiny outpost.

ASYLUMS

Moreton Bay had its share of Government institutions. First established was the Benevolent Asylum at Dunwich in 1864 to house those who were unable to look after themselves. Such people included the aged, the infirm, alcoholics, and those suffering from epilepsy  and consumption (Tuberculosis). This remained until 1946 when it was transferred to Eventide at Sandgate .

Next was the prison at St Helena that ran as such from 1867 until 1933.

The Lazaret at Peel Island  was another asylum – this time for Queensland’s Leprosy patients. Established in 1907, it was to remain in operation until 1959 but even to this day, the stigma of leprosy hangs over the island.

RECREATION

With indoor entertainment limited in the frontier society of the late 1800s, Moreton Bay became a major source of recreation. With no electricity yet invented to operate fans or the air conditioning we are becoming ever more dependent on today, Brisbane must have been a real hot house during the humid summer months. No wonder that the Bay’s cooling breezes provided a great incentive for Brisbanites to flock to the newly established resorts of Sandgate  and Cleveland.  Further afield, Bribie Island, with its tranquil beauty, unspoiled beaches, and wonderful fishing became another favourite spot.

SETTLEMENT

Closer to Brisbane, the Bayside suburbs of Wynnum, Manly, and Lota (south of the Brisbane River) and Cribb Island, Nudgee Beach, and Redcliffe (to the north of the river) were to become early dormitory suburbs. People could live there cheaply; ‘town’ was just a bus or train trip away; the climate was more temperate than uptown Brisbane; and they could spend their leisure times on the Bay at their doorstep.

The Southern Bay islands, too, were settled, and in the Great Depression  many sought refuge there from the economic hardships of city life.  Much of the land was cleared for farming, but island life did have its drawbacks - obtaining basic medical help becomes so much more difficult on an island. Today, though, the secret is out and property with a water view, be it Bayside or Riverside is greatly valued.

TRANSPORT

From its first European occupation, the Bay has been host to a constant stream of vessels from interstate and overseas. The shallow and treacherous waters of the Bay have claimed many victims and pilots with local knowledge are required to board visiting vessels outside the Bay and guide them through the correct channels to the Port of Brisbane.

The waterways of Moreton Bay quickly became the highways for the development of the region. It would not be until after WWII that road transport would take over from the cargo boats. Vessels would ply from Brisbane northwards to Bribie Island and Caloundra  and south to Southport and Nerang. Best known of the early cargo carrying families were the Tripcony’s and later the Maloney Brothers (Northern Bay) and the Gibson’s, and Kleinschmidt ’s (Southern Bay). But surely it was the dear old ‘Maid of Sker', that grand dame of the Southern Bay, which best epitomises that era, and which is remembered with the greatest affection – even if is only the sight of her stranded on a sandbank waiting helplessly for the tide to lift her off. There was a spirit of camaraderie amongst the boatmen that helped define a special quality of  ‘Moreton Bay people’. It derived from an intimate knowledge of its ever changing waterways, and a realisation of Man’s dependence on the whims of Nature, and of the unwritten requirement to help others out in times of need. The Bay can be a dangerous place to the unwary.

INDUSTRY

The Bay had always been a bountiful source of food and shelter for the Aborigines. This supply proved sustainable to their needs because they were relatively few in number, their hunting methods relatively unsophisticated, and they were not greedy in their harvests in that they only took enough for their immediate requirements (thank goodness they didn’t have refrigerators!).

When Europeans arrived in Moreton Bay, they were quick to exploit the Bay’s great resources both as a source of income and as a source of recreational pleasure. The cedar trees  were felled, the rich land of the southern bay islands farmed, while the waters of the Bay were harvested for their oysters, fish, crabs, dugong oil, and anything else for which there was a market.

From 1952 until 1962, a whaling station operated at Tangalooma on Moreton Island. Far from being a controversial undertaking then as it would be today, the establishment of the whaling station was accepted as a step forward to bring Moreton Bay into line with a generally accepted practice worldwide. It was the advent of vegetable margarine, and plastics that made whaling unprofitable. This, coupled with the declining whale numbers passing up for the coast for breeding, forced the closure of Tangalooma after just ten years of operation. Even so when Les Nash, a lookout on the whale chasers but now an avid whale watcher at Point Lookout, gave a newspaper interview in the early 1990s – 30 years after Tangalooma closed down, he received two highly critical phone calls from conservationists for his part in the whale slaughter. This displays the latters’ ignorance of history and of their failure to differentiate between what was acceptable then and what is acceptable today. They could just as easily abused their grandparents for feeding whale meal to their stock or using whale oil for cooking or medicinal purposes, or for grandma wearing a whalebone corset! Each era has what I like to call a ‘community consciousness’. It’s something that is difficult to define in history books but is, nonetheless, real. What is acceptable to one generation may be totally abhorrent to the next. We have seen it in other areas, too: Australia’s ties to England have been replaced by those to the United States; our attitude to indigenous people’s rights in the community has become more accepting; the community is more understanding of people with contagious diseases (Hansen’s Disease patients are now treated in Hospitals instead of being isolated on Peel Island as they once were); we have realised that our resources are no longer unlimited; and so on. Changes in our ‘community consciousness’ aren’t history per se, but they are influenced by history, and this is why a knowledge of our history is so important.

PERSONALITIES

Moreton Bay has always had its share of ‘personalities’ among those who have chosen to spend their lives in its domain. Its waters demand respect based on seamanship of the highest order, commonsense, courage in adversity, an intimate knowledge of its channels and shallows, compassion for others, and a love of freedom that only an outdoor life can offer; and if the odd eccentricity should surface, then all the better!

BEYOND THE BAY

When Matthew Flinders entered Moreton Bay in 1799, he introduced this isolated sanctuary to civilisation. Never again would it be a world divorced from the affairs of the world ‘outside’. We’ve already seen how persecution and economic hardship in Europe brought waves of immigrants to our shores. A more tangible remnant is to be found at Fort Lytton, built in the late 1800s to defend the Bay against a feared Russian invasion, that never came.

A more dramatic impact on the Bay was the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s, occasioned by America’s Stock Market crash and its resultant huge unemployment flow on in the Western World. The islands of Southern Moreton Bay in particular became a refuge for the jobless of Brisbane. Here people could erect shelters and live off the Bay’s still abundant resources, in a way not unlike their Aboriginal counterparts of a century earlier.

World War II brought another threat of invasion to our shores, this time from the Japanese. Moreton Bay became a focal point for the build-up of American servicemen and equipment to assist in the eventual Allied victory. The remnants of Forts at Bribie  and Moreton Islands are a few of the tangible reminders of these days.

The latter half of the twentieth century saw a period of stability and growth return to Moreton Bay but the new millennium has seen our complacency shaken once again by world events. Immigrants this time from Asia , are once again seeking refuge, legal or otherwise, in our shores and Pinkemba  has even been suggested as a possible site for a holding camp.  The economy too is jittery, but the Bay’s resources are no longer enough to sustain the jobless. War , once again, threatens, but the fear of the invading army is now the fear of the unseen terrorist.

THE BAY TODAY

From the time of European settlement, our relationship with Moreton Bay has been one of exploitation. It has only been in recent years that we have come to the realisation that the Bay’s resources are finite and that they are not automatically self regenerating

The Bay’s main threat is from people. We have built the now large city of Brisbane on a river that drains into the centre of the Bay, and much of the Bay’s environmental problems would be solved if we could move Brisbane away from the Bay. But this is impossible. The best we can do is monitor what we put into the Bay – refuse, sewerage, storm water, industrial toxic waste, farm fertilizers, sediment from soil erosion etc. All these by-products of our civilisation have been building up over the two centuries of European occupation to have a devastating effect on the Bay’s once pristine waters.

But there is hope. We are now at least aware of the problems and Government agencies and concerned public groups are now working to ensure that we control our use of the Bay, for it is only through regulation that we can reverse the effects of our overuse of the Bay and its resources.

Peter Ludlow

February 2006.

Condensed from ‘A Stroll Through Time’  ( “Moreton Bay Letters” )