Story 9 Describing Bribie Island

The following story is one of 27 stories presented in Describing Bribie Island 1865-1965: historical first-hand accounts of visiting Bribie Island produced by the Bribie Island Historical Society in 2017.

Bribie Passage: a wonderful waterway by Vance Palmer (1926)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Vance Palmer[1] (1885-1959) was born at Bundaberg to Henry and Jessie Palmer. His early education was in several Queensland towns and his school-teacher father Henry Palmer was a strong influence. Though Vance worked in jobs that varied from a city office clerk to tutor and book-keeper on a Queensland cattle-station, he found success through his writing. He married Nettie Higgins in London in 1914. From 1925-1929, Vance and Nettie lived economically, by their pens, at Caloundra with their small children. Vance published The Man Hamilton in 1928 and The Passage in 1930 both books probably set in the Pumicestone Passage. The couple knew Andrew Tripcony and Dick Dalton, were interested in aboriginal folklore and visited the Petrie family at Murrumba[2].

Vance Palmer submitted this article to The Daily Mail and it was published in The Daily Mail (Brisbane) 20 February 1926, page 16.

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On all the east coast, from the lakes and inlets of Mallacoota in the south to the tiny islands of the Barrier Reef, there is no more delightful stretch of smooth water than the long and narrow passage running between Bribie and the mainland. It is astonishing that it is so little known. Up to the present, though, there have been few means of access to it.

The excursion boats, with their loads of day trippers, regularly make the passage to Bongaree, the flat, little settlement on the southern end of Bribie, wait for a few hours, and then turn homeward again; but anyone wanting to make the full journey up the wonderful waterway to Caloundra has to trust to an arrangement with a casual motor boat.  There are a couple of larger boats it is true that run with stores the whole way from Brisbane, but they are dependent on the tides, and cannot conform to a schedule that would suit passengers.

Yet those who have only glimpsed the passage from the southern end of Bribie can have no conception of its charm.  It is when the broad gates of the southern entrance have been left behind, and the tree-lined shores begin to close round the boat, that the passenger is moved to sit up and take notice. The wind-ripped surface of the water changes to an unruffled calm; little green islands appear on all sides; the blue, transparent shapes of the Glasshouse Mountains loom up in the sky like gigantic figures brooding over a magic lake. The very atmosphere of the sea is forgotten. It is a lake one imagines oneself to be drifting over – a lake so secret and sheltered that it is immune from the operations of wind and tide. Of course it is not, but that is the impression. Even the quiet movement of the current is hidden from the eye. The boat winds between islands so numerous and scattered that the traveler is liable to lose his sense of direction and forget which portion of the tree-studded shore is Bribie and which is the mainland of the continent. It is a low-lying shore, but varied. Sometimes a forest of mangroves hides the near view, and at other times there are sandhills thick with sheoak pines, or stretches of open forest where the eye travels over a dark green sward into depths of shadow.

A few cattle stare at the boat from openings in the timber. Occasionally a couple of kangaroos hop along the shores pause and listen to the chug-chug of the engines, and then make back without unnecessary panic to their secret haunts. The armies of black swans feeding into the mullet-weed near the shore do not show the faintest sign of alarm, or even interest, and the stately pelican, sailing in company with its shadow over the still water, only hastens its progress slightly to get out of way of the boat.

The glimpses of wild life are a reminder that once these waters, and the low-lying country around them, were a happy hunting-ground for the blacks. It is said that a few generations ago, at least a thousand had their headquarters here, and that they never had to go short of food. There was game of all sorts in abundance; the waters were teeming with fish and oysters; the thick, flowering shrubs were alive with honey-bees.

Emus are still to be seen on the open flats, and probably the boles of rotting trees held the favoured wichetty-grub in plenty. Altogether it was a natural paradise for those who came before us. But, where are their descendants now? Where, indeed? Probably the game, plentiful enough still, is shyer and more scattered than it used to be. The rich oyster-beds are staked out and leased, and sometimes for large rentals, and the only sign of human presence is the occasional whitewashed bungalow of an oysterman, set in a clearing and surrounded by a vivid green patch of buffalo grass.

One or two curious relics of the blacks’ camps remain, though. Here and there is a green knoll, not very large, but standing out prominently because of its height and smoothness.  The place of some tribal religious rite, you guess. No, not exactly. Inquiry has proved them to rest on a solid basis of oyster shells, the remnant of gargantuan feasts of the past. The loose sand has drifted over these heaps, the grass has sprouted, and they remain now as the only monuments those happy, care-free people have left behind them.

About half-way between the southern end of Bribie and Caloundra the passage suddenly narrows, the boat gliding between islands so closely placed together that you could almost pull a mangrove twig from either bank. Often there is a choice of half a dozen channels, but it is wise to follow the beacons. Yet even in the staked passage the water becomes ominously shallow in places. Beneath the boat’s keel the clear sand shows up, and looking over you can see shoals of frightened fish making for the mullet weed.

This is the place where the tides meet, and at low water it is often a case of having to get out and push behind. The larger boats time their passage, of course, to pass over these shallows at highwater, but their presence lends an uncertain factor to the navigation of the channel. An uncertain factor, and, it must be added, a rather humiliating one!

It is disquieting to reflect, for instance, that this passage was once regularly used by timber boats coming from the little ports along the northern coast, and that is can be used in this way no longer.  What had made the change?  The chief cause, it is said, was the mammoth flood of 1893, that brought down logs and timber from the coastal creeks, depositing them in the passage where the sand has silted over them. That was more than 30 years ago, though, and nothing has been done since in the way of dredging.

It is appalling that a waterway like this should have been allowed to pass out of regular use, except for small boats. Even if its charm as a pleasure resort were not allowed to count in the balance it would still have its commercial value in opening up places not easily approached except by water. And for years its oyster beds have provided a rich source of revenue for the State, so that any expenditure on the passage now would only be a partial repayment of what it has produced in the past. The shallow portion is limited, and if it were thoroughly dredged there does not seem likelihood of it silting up badly again.

But these reflections only occur in passing. Gliding along over the still water, it is easy to surrender to the charm of the place as it is now. Memories of other sheltered stretches of blue sea come back. I have a vision of approaching the shores of Finland in the quiet dawn through an archipelago of spruce-covered islands, with the little red roofed chalets of summer visitors from Helsingfors showing through the dark trees; another vision of evenings in the land-locked Japan Sea, with the queer-shaped sails of fishing smacks showing along the shore.

Yet, for pure natural beauty, Bribie Passage can hold its own with these places, in one pair of eyes at least, and it has its own distinct quality. That quality is closely connected with the impressive shapes of the Glasshouse Mountains. Beerwah, Crookneck, and Tibrogargan changing their positions at every turn of the boat, like figures in some stately minuet, and dominating the whole landscape by their very air of deliberate design.

We lose them for a while in the last few miles run to Caloundra. The stretch of water narrows again, and even above the purring of the engine comes the heavy pounding of seas on the outer bar, where Bribie thins and comes to a point, nearly touching the mainland. A white beam from the lighthouse on the hill pierces the dusk, with half-a-hundred other lights twinkling at its base, and the journey comes to an end. Only a 25-mile run, altogether! One leaves the passage feeling that, though its coves and islands have been known for at least two generations, still another will pass before their charm and mystery are really discovered. It is possible, even in the height of the holiday season, to make the whole journey without seeing anyone but a few fishermen dragging the sandy shallows with their nets, or fossicking in the clayey banks for crabs.

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[1] Edward Vivian (Vance) Palmer, biography by Geoffrey Serle, 1988, Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1988.

[2] Fourteen years: extracts from a private journal 1925-1939 by Nettie Palmer, ed. V. Smith, 1988.