QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Connections today

Main background: This fascinating ‘time-capsule’ image from 1981 shows Columbus Queensland berthed at the Port of Brisbane’s new container wharf, with Moreton Island stretching across the distant horizon. Just visible through the legs of the background crane is Bishop Island, created from spoil dredged by the Hercules and Maryborough when the river mouth was fully opened to ocean- going shipping 80 years earlier. Once a popular visiting spot for recreational boaties and day cruises, Bishop Island was also notable for the collection of wrecks dispersed to protect its eastern shores from erosion, among them the former government yacht Lucinda , aboard which the Australian Constitution was drafted. Bishop Island is no more, having been engorged by the steadily advancing reclamation beyond the Fisherman Islands which is the 21st century Port of Brisbane, and is now beneath the reclamation behind Wharf No. 10 – in the upper left corner of the image below. Images courtesy of Ports Corporation Queensland (below, left and right) and Port of Brisbane (background and right)

Hamburg-Süd maintains a more subdued presence around Queensland today, and readers are as likely to have tasted one of the parent company’s supermarket pizzas

as they are to have seen a branded container passing by on a semi-trailer. Bottom: A view upstream from the mouth of the Brisbane River and the much expanded Fisherman Islands port.

mark duffus

mark duffus

27