REGULAR FEATURES
MAKING A QUID ON BRIBIE Different in the Olden Days.
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Barry Clark Bribie Island Historical Society
MORE BRIBIE HISTORY The next Historical Society meeting is Wednesday 11 MAY at 6;30 pm at the RSL Club when famous Historian and Author Peter Ludlow will be guest speaker See more on our new Web Site Bribiehistoricalsociety. org.au and our Blog Site http://bribieislandhistory. blogspot.com or contact us on bribiehistoricalsociety@ gmail.com 36
he title and headline image for this article may have caught your attention. It is a 1965 advert by Ross McCowan, a Brisbane Developer who built the first block of Home Units on Benabrow Avenue, Bellara, just after the Bribie Bridge opened in 1963. He was selling a two bedroom, two story, row of seven Home Units for 3250 Pounds each ($6500) with a deposit of just 650 Pounds ($1300). Those Town Houses are still there in Benabrow Avenue, by the crossing, opposite the shops. Today we hear people, mostly Politicians, talking about BILLIONS of dollars, and Real Estate agents selling homes for MILLIONS of dollars. I find it quite hard to imagine just what that amount of money looks and smells like. How big is a pile of old one-dollar notes, totaling ONE MILLION dollars.? It would be as high as a 32-storey building. Now multiply that by a THOUSAND, and you would have a pile of one thousand million one-dollar notes, which would be ONE BILLION DOLLARS. Impossible to imagine ……but we hear that figure every day.! This article puts money and time in perspective, and what people did on Bribie to make a living 100 years ago. If you are under 60 years of age you will not remember that money was in Pounds, Shillings and Pence back then, until Australia changed to decimal currency in 1966, when ten shillings became a Dollar, and a Pound became two Dollars.
DUGONG FISHING
From the 1870’s pioneers were harvesting and farming Oysters in Pumicestone Passage, grazing cattle, and cutting timber on the island
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The Bribie Islander
and mainland. One of the first people to operate a business on Bribie was Fred Foster who hunted Dugong in the Bay and set up a small process operation at his camp on the corner of what is now Foster Street and Banya lane in the late 1880’s.
Dugong Fishermen Having caught some Dugong, Fred Foster used a flat bottom punt to bring the carcasses to his camp beside a freshwater pond fronting the present Bribie State School. His camp was on a high spot, clear of summer flooding and he would transport the Dugong along what is now William’s creek. The creek fed a swamp about where the Seaside Museum and Bongaree Arcade is today, crossed Toorbul lane, through the church yard to his camp site. He butchered the Dugong, carved the meat for curing in a smokehouse, and sold all the meat, blubber, oils and hide in Brisbane. Processing involved the oil gently oozing from the blubber when heated on large metal plates.
