Cardwell & District Historical Society

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Introduction

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In the very centre of Cardwell in 2008

Welcome to the bountiful history of Cardwell and district.

The oldest white settlement in Australia’s far north east, Cardwell was proclaimed as Port Hinchinbrook more than 150 years ago.

The first landing party sailed north from Port Denison (Bowen) and raised the Union Jack on the beach of Rockingham Bay on Friday, January 22, 1864.

Nestled between Australia’s Great Dividing Range and the mountainous splendour of Hinchinbrook Island, Cardwell is a seaside town caressed by natural beauty that has inspired and soothed the soul for generations.

The emblematic flame tree (the flower of which is depicted at the top of each main page on this website) grows naturally on hillsides and in surrounding valleys: a vivid symbol of an unbroken link with an ancient era when Aboriginal people were the sole occupiers of these lush warm lands.

Direct descendants of those ancestral occupiers, the  Girramay people still live locally, and Cardwell is home to the Girringun Aboriginal Corporation which represents nine different tribal groups over a vast surrounding area.

Cardwell today has a small population and quiet rural lifestyle that disguises its energetic and enterprising history. During the 19th century, grazing, meat production and export, dairying, gold mining, telegraphic communications, timber cutting, fishing, sugar plantations, general farming and shipping drove its economy.

You can explore the story of Cardwell and District through this website: its initial promise as jewel on the frontier of the vast British Empire, and the early influence of Europeans in its destiny.

You can view videos here now, or purchase our publications online to read at your leisure. Our store of archives is in development and currently very small, but they are accessible here where you will also find links to other archives or organisations through which you may also research Cardwell district history.

If you visit Cardwell you can inspect our exhibitions in the J. C. Hubinger Museum, which is part of an historic precinct in the centre of Cardwell on Australia’s national highway along the seafront.

Our Ancient Past before 1864!

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Cardwell is the home of the Girringun Aboriginal Corporation comprising nine tribal groups that have long lived within a vast region centred on where Cardwell is now located.

Some 650 descendants of these groups work through Girringun to preserve their histories and identity so their enchanting stories connecting the region to ancient lifestyles will endure.

Cardwell township lies within Girramay country.

Girramay Country Museum

Girringun Map

Girringun Map

The Cardwell district falls across country that was occupied by several Aboriginal language groups when the first white landing party came ashore in 1864.
Settlement, as the white colonisers proclaimed it, with notions of permanency, was a foreign concept to the Girramay people and their neighbours. There was nothing here resembling the European ‘built environment’ before 1864, although there was an elaborate ‘infrastructure’ of bush tracks and venerated sites. Girringun elders say that there was a meeting place at Meunga Creek where neighbouring tribes came together with the Girramay people for ceremonies and other important events.
Direct descendants of Aboriginal people who lived in and around this area when the first white settlers arrived, still live within the district today.
The nine Girringun groups identified on the Girringun map below represent a region extending from the islands of Hinchinbrook, Goold, Dunk and the Family Group to the inland towns of El Arish, Herberton, Ravenshoe, Greenvale and Rollingstone.

Can You Help Identify This Soldier?

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This portrait of a soldier wearing what would appear to be a Boer War uniform is in a collection of photographs of Mrs Mary Creagh (1882-1962) of Cardwell.

Our soldier is wearing the typical Australian military garb of the late 1800s and early 1900s, according to Australian War Memorial records. The leather ammunition pouches slung across his left shoulder (see below) are similar to those worn by Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant and other Boer War veterans.

UNKNOWN SOLDIER - Mary Creagh Collection

UNKNOWN SOLDIER – Mary Creagh Collection

Not all Boer War soldiers wore emu feathers in their slouch hats, but it seems most, if not all Queenslanders did, and were fiercely proud of the emblem long before it was more widely adopted across Australian horse units. Queenslanders also turned up the left side of their hats from the earliest days of the first Australian military ‘uniforms’, unlike some other states where the right side was initially cocked.

This all suggests that our soldier was a Queenslander, and given that Mary lived her life entirely in Cardwell, except when she attended school and boarded at St Patrick’s College in Townsville, one might be inclined to the view that her soldier was likely to be a north Queenslander.

At the time the first Australian units left for South Africa to fight in the Boer War in December 1899, Mary was 18 years old. She was the youngest of seven children of Johann and Elizabeth Huginber, and after leaving school she ran their family store in Victoria Street. Mary also kept many photographs and this was among them.

Another in Mary’s collection includes the photograph (below right) of Jim (James) and Tom (Thomas) Spollen, whose parents arrived in Cardwell in 1867. The older of the two brothers, Tom, appears to have some resemblance to our unknown soldier but we’re far from certain they’re the same person. There is also no record that we can find of a Spollen having fought in the Boer War, or in other conflicts around that time.

If you can help identify Mary’s friend, please contact CDHS via email or post, so we might accord this soldier the respect and recognition he deserves.

Victoria Street 1890

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Cricket was played on Victoria Street in Cardwell in the 1800s.

Until the 1960s horses, cattle, wallabies and curlews strolled the seafront in town in the evenings.

Victoria St 120 years ago

Victoria St 120 years ago

Few trees grew on the beach sand dunes apart from Calophyllums and coconuts. The sea breeze was Cardwell’s air-conditioning.

Victoria Street is today’s Bruce Highway – part of Highway One – which runs along the beachfront in the business centre of Cardwell.
The Marine Hotel, a single storey building then (as seen above) but later with two storeys, is in the same location now, more than a century later.
An unidentified pedestrian stands beside a gas street lamp, while another relaxes against an upright on the hotel verandah.
Bowen Street which runs parallel and one back from the seafront was Cardwell’s main street in the town’s very early years.
Victoria Street remains now where it was then, even after cyclone Yasi, making Cardwell the only town or city where the Bruce Highway runs along the sea front.

Cardwell’s Museum a bargain in 1892

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VALUE FOR MONEY!

Until cyclone Yasi, the J. C. Hubinger Museum was the oldest remaining, intact building erected specifically for the birth of local government in Queensland’s north.

Built in 1892, it was an historic symbol of recycling and economic efficiency.

If you believe society has made remarkable progress over the past 120 years, consider this. The J. C. Hubinger Museum, substantially rebuilt since cyclone Yasi, was erected as Cardwell’s Town Hall in 1892 at a cost recorded as £228. Some reports put the bill at £273, but for this exercise let’s stick with £228.
According to our research, Australia adopted the British pound and used it as Australia’s currency in the 1800s, a practice that continued well into the 20th century, so that bill for Cardwell’s Town Hall, was 228 British pounds.
The National Archives in Britain conversion chart informs us that £228 (in Britain) in 1890 would have bought the equivalent of £13,655 (in the UK) in 2009. Using an exchange rate of $1 (Australian) equalling 62 British pence (£0.62), that converts to the equivalent of $22,135 (Australian). If the original Cardwell bill was £273, the equivalent cost today is still only around $26,500.
In other words, those Cardwell Town Hall builders of 1892 were either little short of remarkable in delivering value for money, or incredibly generous with their time. The insurance payout to partly rebuild the J. C. Hubinger Museum in 2012, including smaller repairs on surrounding heritage assets, approached $900,000, and that did not include the foundations or the significant internal concert stage which remain from the original 1800s building. So how did that wealth of productivity and efficiency of the late 19th century disappear over the last 120 years?
Some of the timber used to build the Town Hall of 1892 came from the former courthouse building next door, so a portion of the cost efficiencies achieved can be explained by recycling, a standard practice back then, although that’s surely well short of explaining the potential savings on today’s valuations.
It’s another good reason to remember our early pioneers, and salute their extraordinary and lasting achievements in an era long before the ease offered by today’s social, industrial and technical advances.
This is also a compelling argument why the J. C. Hubinger Museum, and its super-efficient construction history, should be publicly admired and preserved. We got the first 119 years for virtually nothing!

John Oxley Library Award Winners

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john-oxley-awardThe Cardwell & District Historical Society (CDHS) has a reputation for excellence and innovation in the recording and documenting of history. In June 2012 it won the prestigious John Oxley Library Community History Prize.

This award recognised the intensive work by members of the society in retrieving valuable collections in Cardwell’s J. C. Hubinger Museum from among the debris after cyclone Yasi on February 3, 2011. The society’s successful endeavours in rebuilding the local history collection and re-establishing a public museum in Cardwell were highlighted.

Also featured was the work of recording oral histories so soon after the traumatic experience and devastation of cyclone Yasi, which was rated by the Bureau of Meteorology among the four most intense cyclones in Queensland’s recorded history.

Three members of the CDHS, president Anne Mealing, vice president Stephanie Berger and treasurer Dianne Smith jointly accepted the award from noted scholar and author, Dr Dale Spender, acting chairperson of the Library Board of Queensland at the 2012 ceremony held in the John Oxley Library beside the Brisbane River.