The members of the Great Barrier Reef Expedition received an enthusiastic welcome upon arrival in Australia, when the
Ormonde called at Fremantle, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney - arriving finally in Brisbane on 9 July 1928. Mattie Yonge, the expedition’s medical officer, described the group’s reception in Australia as “such that might have been given to royalty”.
[1] A veritable who’s who of Brisbane’s scientific community turned out to welcome the party at a gala dinner the following evening which gives some indication of the importance the Queensland Government placed on the expedition. Guests included members of the executive of the Great Barrier Reef Committee, the Commissioner for Public Health, the Government Botanist and the Director of the Queensland Museum, along with a number of senior university academics. Also present was Mr F.W. Moorhouse, of the Queensland Education Department, who had been seconded to the Department of Harbours and Marine by the Premier, who was to join the initial expedition party to Low Isles.
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| The waterfront, Cairns, 1928. Moran's Strand Hotel is in the centre of the photograph. Photo: National Library of Australia. |
The following day, Yonge’s group departed Brisbane and travelled by rail to Cairns, a journey that took two and a half days. The expedition members were accommodated at A.J. Moran’s Strand Hotel for a couple of days while the last items of necessary equipment and provisions were purchased. One of the many publications that resulted from the expedition was A Year on the Great Barrier Reef, which was written by Yonge and intended for a lay audience. In it, Yonge wrote that thanks to A.J. Moran, “we gained our first introduction to the glories of the tropical rainforest in the foothills behind the city.”[2]
It was while they were staying at Moran’s hotel that Yonge’s team experienced their first adventure in North Queensland. Moran took the Yonge’s and several others from the expedition party out to Freshwater by car to show them the rainforest.[3] Although Freshwater is now a suburb of Cairns, at the time of Yonge’s visit much of the area was still relatively untouched by progress. At one stage Moran was negotiating a steep incline when the car slid off the dirt track into a creek. Fortunately no one was injured, and after failing to push the car out, the group walked two miles to the nearest cane farm. Their next challenge was to try and explain to the Italian farmer there (who spoke no English) that they were stranded. Horses were loaned to pull the car out of the creek and the group eventually arrived back in Cairns that night, none the worse for their rainforest adventure.
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| A.J. Moran's car crossing Freshwater Creek, Cairns, 1928. Photo: Russell Album 1, Sir Charles Maurice Yonge Collection. |
Most of the team’s scientific equipment had already been shipped from England and transferred to Low Isles before their arrival in Cairns. A volunteer naturalist named J.E. Young had supervised the design, delivery and construction of six huts at the site. These were intended to variously function as a laboratory, married and single living quarters, kitchen, toilets and bathroom. Only a “bare modicum of furniture”[4] was provided, but functional pieces of furniture were soon ingeniously adapted from packing crates and empty kerosene tins. In addition to the newly constructed buildings, there was already a lighthouse on the island, and huts for the three lighthouse keepers and their families. Though the buildings constructed for the expedition were not of a particularly permanent nature (being only timber and corrugated iron) it was expected that in the event of a cyclone, the lighthouse would serve as a refuge for the island’s inhabitants as it had survived many cyclones since its construction in the late 1870s.
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| Dr Maurice Yonge is seated at a bench inside the Low Isles laboratory, 1928. Photo: Russell Album 2, Sir Charles Maurice Yonge Collection. |
Once final preparations were in place, all that remained was for the party to travel the final 70 km of their epic journey to the island that would become their home for the next thirteen months. Yonge wrote of his first impressions of the Great Barrier Reef:
“About noon on July 16th we sailed from Cairns on the M.L. Daintree on the forty-five mile journey to our final destination. Nothing could have been more perfect than our introduction to these lagoon seas on which so much of our time for the coming year would be spent. The alluvial flat upon which Cairns stands soon disappeared from view. We passed over the calmest of blue waters beneath a clear sky and a vivid sun.”[5]
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| First day on the reef, Low Isles, 17 July 1928. Photo: Russell Album 3, Sir Charles Maurice Yonge Collection. |
Trisha Fielding, Special Collections Library Officer
James Cook University Library
If you missed Part 1 - you can catch up here
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Read more about the Sir C.M. Yonge Collection
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Browse the titles in the Sir C.M. Yonge Collection
[1] McCalman, Iain,
The Reef: a passionate history, Viking, Melbourne, 2013, p. 253.
[2] Yonge, C.M.
A Year on the Great Barrier Reef, Putnam, London, 1930, p. 24.
[3] Advocate (Burnie, Tas.) 18 July 1928, p. 3.
[4] Yonge, C.M.
A Year on the Great Barrier Reef, p. 27.
[5] Ibid., p. 25.
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