There used to be a native police encampment at the base of the escarpment, just below where the Catholic Church now stands in Sandgate. During the 1840s, this was a dangerous place, for black and white alike. One man was killed near the Second Lagoon, somewhere near Sotherden St. People died, on both sides, but it was the local Turrabul people who suffered most.
The native police had the job of keeping the two races apart, by force if necessary. It’s easy to imagine where they camped, between the mangroves which grew along the shoreline and the lagoon where they watered their horses, somewhere near the walking track that now links Brighton Road to the houses below.
I used to live in the western suburbs, a featureless sprawl of postwar chamferboard and tile, a streetscape designed by developers, and parks created from wasteland not even a developer could love. I lived in Boomerang Road. The road was shaped like a boomerang, but I had no sense of an Aboriginal presence there. Once the natural watercourses are funneled into culverts, and the hills and valleys are tamed into real estate, it is hard to get a sense of a place. I lived in a suburb shorn of its history.
Sandgate is different. In Sandgate, the past is still visible; the bones are close to the surface. Lagoons, escarpments and the sea. Eels migrating from the lagoon to the sea at full moon, and sting rays in the sand on the full tide. Bird eggs in spring, and fish always, but especially when the coral spawns in early summer. Good tucker. I hear the skeletons rattling here, in a way I never did when I lived on the other side of Brisbane. Since coming to Sandgate four years ago, her history has haunted me. Her history is the story of the Turrabal people and the story of the pioneers, and of the clash between these two worlds.
I’m a newcomer here, but my great grandfather was mayor of Sandgate in the 1890s. He was a newcomer too, in the longer scheme of things. The history of those pioneers is also tangible in Sandgate, written on the landscape. The Masonic hall, the post office, the pier. The rattle of Cobb and Co’s coaches, and ships bringing timber down from Wide Bay to build the fine houses of the Sandgate gentry, like the house on the hill overlooking the water where my grandfather was born. How proud they were of their achievements, those pioneers. A new town hall and a railway line to Brisbane and the Governor coming to eat oysters at the beach.
In Sandgate the past is all around you, within walking distance, if you only pause to look for it.
