Redland City trail

The small settlement on Cleveland Point was initiated as a wool port by Ipswich graziers around 1850. Francis Bigge and Robert Graham built a brick bond store and wool stores on the point in 1851. The township was surveyed and offered for sale in 1851 and Bigge built a boarding house in 1852. However, Cleveland’s port aspirations were short-lived and the boarding house became known as Bigge’s Folly. It was managed by John Cassim until 1862, when he built his own hotel nearby. Bigge’s Folly was later extended into the structure we now know as the Grand View Hotel. The Cleveland lighthouse was completed in the mid-1860s. The front wall of the Lighthouse Restaurant is reputedly part of the original bond store. Bigge’s store was used as the early police magistrate’s office, and is now the Courthouse Restaurant. Cleveland Point became a seaside resort for Brisbane residents. A pair of Norfolk Pines marks the site of one of these early holiday houses. St Paul’s Anglican Church was built in 1873 on land donated by another Ipswich grazier George Thorn. The Cleveland Police Station and courthouse are reminders of the second phase of policing in the district when a new courthouse was built in 1880.

Around the corner in Middle Street, is Toondah Harbour, where the ferries to North Stradbroke Island depart. Sail across Moreton Bay, passing Peel Island. It was once a quarantine station, and later a leprosarium and is now Teerk Roo Ra National Park. The Dunwich ferry landing is part of a stone jetty built by convicts in 1827. The nearby football oval was the site of the soldier’s barracks of the Moreton Bay convict settlement. All that remains is the privy pit (squat toilet) outlet – not far from the stone jetty. Further into the Dunwich township is the Public Hall and St Mark’s Anglican Church; both remnants of the Dunwich Benevolent Asylum which operated from 1865 until 1947. Dunwich had initially been the quarantine station for Moreton Bay from 1850. Sadly, the cemetery, further along the road towards Point Lookout, includes victims of typhoid from aboard the ship ‘Emigrant’. Traverse the island to the ocean and walk around the headland and gorges at Point Lookout. In the cooler months, whale watching is a popular pastime here. Return to Cleveland via ferry or boat.

West of Cleveland township is Cleveland’s early cemetery, the remnants of a fellmongery on the banks of Hilliards Creek, and two significant homesteads either side of this creek: Ormiston House and the associated St Andrew’s Church built by the father of Queensland’s sugar industry Louis Hope, and the privately owned ‘Whepstead’ at Wellington Point, built by Hope’s former employee Gilbert Burnett. Redland Bay to the south has its original state school residence dating to 1885. A ferry across to the southern Moreton Bay Islands of Lamb and Macleay hold other early remnants including a pioneer hall on Lamb Island and the remnants of salt and sugar production on Macleay Island. Further south on the mainland at Serpentine Creek, is another historic cemetery.