Stradbroke Island

[1] Archaeological evidence suggests the Quandamooka, an Aboriginal Australian people, lived on the island for at least 21,000 years prior to European settlement.

There exists a body of Aboriginal oral history that may bear on some such incident, and several artefacts have been found in the sand dunes, including an English silver coin from 1597 and the blade of a 17th-century Spanish rapier.

Whites and Europeans generally lived in reasonable harmony though there were moments of conflict as would be expected within the context of two very different cultures meeting for the first time.

In March 1830, the 57th regiment seeking reprisals for the murder of a guard, attacked a group of Ngugi people near a lagoon on Moreton Island.

[6] In 1843 the first Catholic mission for Aboriginal people was established on Stradbroke Island by Archbishop Polding, a Passionist priest, who visited and chose the site.

[10] Parts of the wreck can still be found in shallow water approximately 500 metres (1,600 ft) offshore south of the Southport Spit and it is a popular diving site.

[13][14][15] In September 1894, heavy seas drove aground the barque Cambus Wallace at a narrow isthmus roughly halfway down the island's length.

Salvage activity (including the detonation of a cargo of explosives) weakened the sand dunes along the spit such that by the spring of 1896, storms and tides had washed a permanent breach from Moreton Bay to the Coral Sea.