QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

The oyster banks of Moreton Bay

The oyster bank, which Augie and some of his sons worked, still shows on some charts as Dux Oyster Bank. The family retained the licence to this bank (#122) until 1957. “Dux’s” remained a popular boating reference to the secluded anchorage behind a long spit of fruitful oyster banks, near the northern end of South Stradbroke, and the Southport Yacht Club maintains facilities and a resident caretaker there today. William, another of Gus’s sons, carried on his father’s business, and was known locally as “Billy the crabman”. At Labrador, the sports field across the road from where the bark hut stood, and Dux family home (still held by some of Augie’s descendants), was named Dux Oval many years later.

In the early 1900s Augie moved to the southern end of Moreton Bay, not far from the trading settlement at Southport, on the Broadwater. His oystering skills secured him work with the Moreton Bay Oyster Company, based at Currigee on South Stradbroke Island, and he married Lillian O’Connell there in 1905. In 1910, Augie and his family moved to Labrador where they rented a house until he and the boys had built a bark hut from local timbers, into which they moved in 1918. When this bark hut was demolished in about 1930 to make way for a more substantial house, the timber was used to construct a hut and jetty on South Stradbroke Island. This hut, with some alterations, is now heritage-listed as “Dux Hut”.

Glass House Mountains

Bribie

Island

Cape Moreton

Pumicestone Passage

Dux’s Creek

Caboolture

Deception Bay

Moreton Island

Moreton Bay

South Passage

BRISBANE

Brisbane River

IPSWICH

Dux’s Anchorage Currigee

Labrador

Above right: Aerial view of the southern end of the Pumicestone Passage, separating Bribie Island from the mainland; oyster leases flourish on the rocks and muddy banks of this shallow -channel, and the Glass House Mountains can be seen in the up per left corner. Right: Aerial view from above Dux’s anchorage, looking south down Tippler’s Passage towards the Broadwater proper; on the upper horizon are the distant towers of the Gold Coast, and its relentless built-up encroachment north.

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