[4] For more than 60 years from 1867, St Helena was the place of imprisonment for many hundreds of society's outcasts, for here was located colonial Queensland's foremost prison for men.

In 1866, as part of their labours, the prisoners were taken each morning across the waters of Moreton Bay by whaleboat to St Helena Island.

Here they were put to work sinking wells, clearing scrub, quarrying stone and building accommodation for a new quarantine station.

On 14 May 1867, the Governor of Queensland signed a proclamation declaring the island 'a place whereat offenders under order or sentence of hard labour or penal servitude may be detained'.

[citation needed] The toughest years on St Helena were undoubtedly the early ones, and the ruins on the island testify to the hard work that the prisoners had to do.

These, too, were the years of severe punishment — the lash, the dreaded dark underground cells, the gag, and energy-sapping shot drill.

Most of the 50 or so men involved were recaptured, although three disappeared without trace, two were drowned or taken by sharks in Moreton Bay, and a few were caught several years later.

[citation needed] By the turn of the century, the St Helena establishment had grown to accommodate over 300 prisoners in a maze of buildings surrounded by a high stockade wall.

[citation needed] Over six decades, there were more than 50 prisoners desperate enough to try to escape but, despite several super-human efforts, their attempts proved futile.

Others discovered boats which had broken loose from moorings on the mainland and had drifted unseen cross the bay into the mangroves at St Helena.

The aborigine, Burketown Peter, clinging desperately to a wooden target-frame used by the warders during rifle practice, vanished beneath the waters of Moreton Bay as his makeshift raft headed out to sea on an outgoing tide.

They had been hiding above the ceiling of the tailors' workshop on St Helena, where they had been aided by a prisoner accomplice who supplied them daily with food and water.

[citation needed] Most escapees, however, rarely got any further than the island mangroves and scrub where they were captured by searching warders, supplemented, if necessary, by police from Brisbane, or driven out by hunger, or by intolerable hordes of mosquitoes.

Notorious gunman Charles Leslie was whisked from the island early one morning in 1924 by criminal accomplices who were waiting offshore in a motor boat.

[citation needed] These days, the island is a tourist destination for school children and visitors to Brisbane alike.