QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Equally, for the state government, with the upstream options exhausted, and none closer to the river mouth available, there was little choice but to site the new bridge close to the ferry crossing points. One eye also had to be kept on shipping needs, with plans for a future cruise ship terminal at Hamilton, and existing users of the drydock facilities at Colmslie. The Gateway Bridge, then, had to straddle a wide, flood-prone river estuary, and stand high enough (55m or 180ft clearance) to allow 70,000 – 80,000 tonne ships beneath, yet low enough (less than 80m or 260ft) that its spans and light fittings could not impinge on the final approach path to the new runway. Brisbane’s Gateway

Forty years after the Story Bridge was completed and opened to traffic, construction work at last began on Brisbane’s much-needed downstream river crossing on 5 June 1980. For 24 of those years, only the ungainly, 169ft (51.5m) vehicular ferry Sir James Holt – named after the architect of the Story Bridge – provided a means of crossing the Quarries Reach from Pinkenba to Queensport. Its limited capacity (36 vehicles), operating costs (three crew) and slow rotations (often half an hour from loading and undocking one side of the river to docking and driving off on the other) numbered its days serving the fast growing capital city.

By the time wrangling over the siting of the proposed bridge was resolved, to the great relief of suburbs of residents upstream, the demands of pressing traffic projections meant construction began before the design was even finished. On 11 January 1986, the six lanes of the soaring $140million structure were pounded by 200,000 excited pedestrians eager to walk the exclusively vehicular crossing. Five months later, HRH the Duke of Edinburgh performed the official opening of the Gateway Bridge to traffic. Associated arterial roads north and south began their progressive march from each end of the bridge towards the highways on the city’s northern and southern fringes. The vision of the Gateway Motorway as Brisbane’s first true orbital connection, meant the bridge’s northside approaches snaked around the runways and aprons of the old Eagle Farm airport, two years before Brisbane’s new airport opened for Expo’88. There were few options open to the federal government in the design of the new airport to the northeast of the reclaimed swamp where Charles Kingsford-Smith and other early aviators landed at Eagle Farm, and the new main runway had, desirably, to be aligned away from the rising buildings in the CBD. Sir James Holt, launched at the Kangaroo Point shipyards on 7 November 1964, was Brisbane’s quaint lower-river crossing for 25 years. Image (201393) courtesy State Library of Queensland

The elegant engineering marvel immediately claimed several world records on completion: • longest main span (260m / 853ft) of a pre stressed concrete free cantilever bridge • largest pre-stressed concrete single box girder structure – 15m (49 ft) deep at the pier, box width 12m (39ft), six-lane deck width 22m (72ft) Its overall length is 1.63km (5,340ft), with a shorter approach (376m / 1,230ft) from the higher ground on the south than the longer climb (730m / 2,400ft) over the reclaimed river flats on the north side. Three central spans of 520m (1,700ft) cross the river itself. In its first year the bridge was crossed by more than 12,000 vehicles a day. By 2005, traffic had risen to 27 million crossings a year and by 2005 plans were made for the Gateway Upgrade Project. The near-$2 billion project – duplicating the six-lane bridge, and widening and extending the motorways for 20km (12 miles) on either side – would be the largest in the state’s history. On 16 May 2010, the Queensland Government announced the official naming of “The Sir Leo Hielscher Bridges” which opened to traffic six days later. Photographer’s focus on the bridge spans suggests this A330 on final approach to Brisbane Airport is further away than it appears. Image (TMR00155) Copyright State of Queensland

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