All things are relative – even where we like to spend our holidays. This has been brought home to us all when, thanks to the Covid 19 virus, we are forced to holiday at home rather than jet off overseas to anywhere in the world that we choose.
I like this observation from Brian McGrath in ‘The Port of Brisbane, Its People and Its Personalities’: ‘During the port development days, we had a series of tide gauges near where we were doing our work, and one of them was on the jetty at Bishop Island. I was down there one day and was putting a new chart on the tide gauge and there was a dear old lady fishing there. I got talking to her and she told me how much she enjoyed coming to Bishop Island every year for her holiday. When I asked her where she came from, I was expecting her to say something like Western Queensland, but she pointed across the river and said, ‘From over there at Cribb Island.’
(Cribb Island, nicknamed ‘Cribbie’, was once an isolated, tight knit community of Aussie battlers who found refuge and cheaper living during The Great Depression. ‘Cribbie’ was demolished to make way for the Brisbane Airport in the early 1980s.)
(Bishop Island, a manmade island formed from spoil after the deepening of the mouth of the Brisbane River, has now been engulfed by the development of the Port of Brisbane and now resides under the area taken up by berth 9.)
