A Brief History of Fraser Island, Queensland, Australia

The history of Fraser Island is inexorably bound up with that of Australian Aborigines, Hervey Bay City, and nearby Maryborough.

The bay of water known as Hervey Bay was so named by Captain James Cook during his navigation of the east coast of Australia in 1770. He thought that Fraser Island was joined to the mainland and the sheltered waters behind it were a bay.

Aborigine family

But the first inhabitants of Australia were the Aboriginal people whose history, though unrecorded, is now believed to date back to before the Ice Age. Evidence from Tasmania indicates some Aborigines survived the Ice Age by living in caves. Their history began in a time they call the Dreaming, when the Ancestor Spirits emerged from the earth and gave form to the landscape. Anthropologists believe that Aboriginal peoples reached eastern Australia at least 40,000 years ago. Tribes lived in the area now known as Fraser Island and Hervey Bay until the English arrived and caused violent disruption to their lives.

Maryborough is one of Queensland's oldest cities, being first settled by Europeans in 1847 as a wool port. The first permanent white settler at Hervey Bay was Boyle Martin who, with his wife and child, arrived in 1863. In the early days of European settlement in Australia Maryborough served as an immigration port for free settlers and was second only to Sydney on the eastern seaboard. Hervey Bay was considered to be part of the Port of Maryborough.

Sailing ships carrying immigrants rarely attempted to navigate the Mary River to the place where Maryborough stands today. Instead, they anchored off the White Cliffs of Fraser Island and passengers were ferried from there in smaller boats. The Silver Eagle pictured here arrived in May 1880 with 264 immigrants after battling strong gales along the way.
The voyage took just over 3 months.

Ambitions of the European squatters and settlers to acquire the land around Maryborough, Fraser Island, and Hervey Bay, without thought or reference to the Aboriginal inhabitants, resulted in predictable conflict. The actions of a few Aboriginals were more than outweighed by the horrors inflicted on local tribes by white settlers. Poisoning of waterholes and serving up meals of flour and bran laced with strychnine and arsenic were among the ways the whites dealt with the black "problem".

Wholesale slaughter of hundreds of innocent Aboriginals took place in retribution for the actions of a few. Settlers enlisted renegade blacks from further south to act as native police, assisting their mass killings of fellow Aboriginals and providing a convenient excuse when blamed for the bloody raids. Mainland Aboriginals were exiled to Fraser Island, but here too they were persecuted, with many being driven into the sea to their deaths on Christmas Eve of 1851 by native police under the local white commandant.

Timber felling and sand mining for minerals became big industries on the island during the twentieth century, but all that ceased when Fraser Island attained its World Heritage Listing in December 1992 in recognition of the island's exceptional sand dune systems, its rainforests on sand, and its beautiful freshwater lakes.

Forests remain one of the island's most controversial features. Though the island was heavily logged, large areas of satinays and brush box still remain. Pile Valley between Central Station and Lake McKenzie, where much of the logging took place, now has some of the tallest trees!

Today, tourism is the backbone of Fraser Island's economy.