Wynnum Manly is one of the oldest parts of Brisbane, and a good deal of it is still standing. The heritage trail links twenty-four places that between them cover Aboriginal occupation, colonial settlement, the fear of invasion, and the slow making of a seaside suburb.
1. Fort Lytton
Built in 1880–81 as the frontline against feared naval raids by European powers. The design is a classic coastal fortress, made to stay invisible to an approaching enemy until the first warning shot — and if that was ignored, an armour-piercing round through the ships.
It carried six gun pits, two machine gun ports, and Armstrong guns that could rise above the ramparts, fire, and drop below the parapet twenty seconds later. A controlled minefield, operated from a concealed tunnel, made it impossible to enter the port unauthorised. Vessels were inspected by a search officer from an examination steamer, which signalled the fort in code; cleared ships were piloted through the minefield. A boom gate and flag system replaced this in the 1930s.
In forty years as Australia’s frontline, the fort fired three warning shots. Nothing ever called its bluff. When a permanent Queensland Defence Force was raised in 1884, the fort’s gunners and engineers were its elite.
It fell derelict after the Second World War until Ampol took the site on in 1963 and maintained it. It is now part of a historic precinct managed for Queenslanders, along with nearby St Helena Island.
2. The Quarantine Station
When Lytton was resumed for defence at the end of the nineteenth century — forty years after it was founded and named for Lord Bulwer Lytton — part of the site became a quarantine station, isolating infected ships, people and goods entering the river. It was in use into the 1980s. Some buildings survive; none are open.
3. Nazareth House
The aged care home on top of Tingal Hill, run by the Poor Sisters of Nazareth, an order founded in London in 1854. The site was formerly Mt Margaret, home of the Queensland premier W. Kidston and later of Archbishop James Duhig.
4. Tingal Road
The Margaret Marr Memorial Home for Boys opened here in 1924 and served during the Second World War as barracks for RAAF Radar Station No. 23 at Lytton Hill. A plaque on a rock 200 metres along on the left marks it.
Tingal Road is one of the oldest in the district, and part of the route by which the Brisbane River was found. In 1823 Pamphlett, Parsons and Finnegan were blown off course south of Sydney and wrecked on Moreton Island. Ngugi people helped them build a canoe, and they crossed to the mainland near Wellington Point, sighting the river as they travelled north along the ridge of Tingal Hill.
5. The Wynnum Point Hotel
Built by Wilde and Adams in the late 1870s and later held by the Fisher family, which is why it was known locally as Fishers for generations. It served the fishing fleet moored in Wynnum Creek. The open two-storey verandahs were closed in, and it was latterly given an art deco treatment. The building has since been demolished.
6. Fox Street Bridge
In 1892 the Creek storekeepers fought hard against a bridge over Wynnum Creek, seeing quite clearly that it would take their customers to the growing Bay Terrace centre. They lost. The first crossing was a shaky log footbridge, later replaced by the stone and concrete structure standing now, since altered with a footpath and railings.
7. Wynnum Fish Markets
At its height in the 1930s the fleet based in Wynnum Creek ran 28 vessels, employed 108 men, and landed a million pounds of fish a year. The fleet is smaller now; the market is busier than ever, supplying local shops and selling to the public.
8. Shire Clerk’s Cottage
Built in 1890 beside the council chambers, so the clerk would always be on hand. It did double duty for shire business and for receiving visiting officials, and it housed a succession of families, since clerks and other staff brought their households with them.
Late Victorian filigree in style, it was altered over the years — verandahs enclosed for sleeping space, decorative work stripped off, probably to save maintenance — and eventually left to decay in an overgrown garden. The leisure centre next door acquired it from the council in the early 1980s and restored it.
9. Kitchener Memorial
Lord Kitchener, known for commanding British troops in the Boer War, reviewed troops from Fort Lytton in 1910. This plaque and Kitchener Park across the railway line are the only public mementos of that visit anywhere in Queensland.
10. Waterloo Bay Hotel
The original open-verandah section was built in 1889 for George Gibbs, a local stonemason. The public bar alongside dates from the 1920s. Still a local, and still largely itself.
11. Former Wynnum Central Post Office
Wynnum’s second post office, built in 1923 to a design used repeatedly across Queensland between 1920 and the mid 1930s — symmetrical, with twin open porches into the public space. It stopped being a post office in 1995 and is now a medical centre, structurally little changed.
12. Wynnum Baptist Church
A latecomer. The first services were held in the Shire Clerk’s Cottage. A small church was built in Edith Street in 1912 and extended in four stages, then moved in two sections to the present site in 1930.
13. Guardian Angels’ Church
The district’s first Catholic church, designed by architect Richard Gailey and built in 1905 on an acre given to the parish by Archbishop Dunne. Guardian Angels’ primary school shares the site.
14. Mt Carmel Convent
Designed by Hall and Dods for the Sisters of Mercy in 1915, with cast iron filigree balustrading and deep shaded verandahs, both still in good order.
15. Wynnum-Manly School of Arts
The central section opened as a library in 1915, with concert and dining halls added on either side. It has hosted district horticultural shows, society balls and weekly dances, and it still takes bookings.
16. Former Wynnum Ambulance Centre
Built in 1926 for £3,000, the community matching the government pound for pound — red brick with rendered banding, in keeping with the Masonic Hall nearby. The ambulance service moved out in 1995.
17. Masonic Hall
A Regency-style temple standing alone among houses, built in 1920 for £4,000 by twenty-four founding members.
18. Cambridge Parade shops
Manly Creek once ran through what is now the shopping strip, and the early water supply came from a dam across it. The shops keep their original post-supported awnings and their residential upper floors, verandahs projecting over the footpath.
19. Stone retaining wall
Three metres thick and standing 7.5 metres above the road, it looks more like a bastion than a retaining wall. It was built in 1933 as Depression relief work, from stone quarried at Lytton.
Look closely at the mortar joints. One of the workmen pressed small concrete figures into them — kangaroos, emus, goannas and human heads. Allow time to find them.
20. View of Moreton Bay from Manly Hill
From the top, the whole of Waterloo Bay is laid out. Governor Brisbane named it for the Duke of Wellington and the victory at Waterloo. The larger Moreton Bay, which encloses it, was named by Cook in 1770 — though it was Flinders in 1799 who established that what Cook took for mainland was a chain of islands.
Left to right: the Port of Brisbane at Fisherman Islands, Moreton Island, St Helena Island, Green Island, Stradbroke Island.
21. Lota House
William Duckett White built this Victorian Regency house for his retirement in 1864 and named it Lota, after his wife’s house above Cork Harbour in Ireland. It is the oldest residence in the district and keeps much of its grandeur. The Anglican Church now runs it as an aged care home, the Edwin Marsden Tooth Memorial Home.
22. Manly Boat Harbour
The largest small-craft harbour in Queensland, established in 1958. The Royal Queensland Yacht Squadron moved its clubhouse here in 1964. The stone breakwaters shelter the entrance and make a good place to fish. At the point, past the trailer boat club, a Rotary directory plaque names what you can see.
23. Wading Pool
Built in 1932, it holds seawater by closing valves along the sea wall. It has never stopped being popular, and on a weekend the parkland and takeaway shops around it are packed.
The large sandstone monument with three drinking fountains commemorates W.H. Barnes MLA, a former State Treasurer who represented Bulimba and then Wynnum from 1901 to 1933.
24. Wynnum Pier and Pandanus Beach
The salt flats along the waterfront could only be reclaimed as parkland once the stone sea wall went up in the 1930s. On a king tide in a blow, walking the wall is an event in itself. The pier runs out into the bay and usually has an angler on it.
Pandanus Beach opened in 1987 and is the largest stretch of sand in the district. The name comes from the same root as Wynnum: winnam, the pandanus.
Sources
- Armstrong, H.W. (1971) The History and Development of the Wynnum District, Brisbane
- Beitz, M.N. (1982) Mangroves to Moorings: The Past 100 Years of Manly, Queensland, Manly Centenary Committee, Brisbane