Caloundra - by Erica Costigan

With the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1942, both Caloundra and Bribe Island became, literally, armed camps guarding the entrance to the Port of Brisbane. Ships entering Moreton Bay came down the North-west Channel six kilometres or so, from the Bribe Island’s ocean beach. All the way they were under the cover of guns, observation posts and minefields. At Wickham Point, beside Caloundra Head, a two-story concrete tower housed a signal station and fire command post for minefields in the bay. The beaches below were guarded by barbed wire entanglements and machine guns.
Bribe Island civilians had been evacuated, and along the length of the ocean beach concrete gun emplacements had been built and heavy coastal defence guns installed.
To get supplies, a road was bulldozed through the bush from Caboolture to Toorbul Point and a barge put on a regular run across Pumicestone Passage.
Toorbul Point itself, Queensland’s first anchorage, and once proposed by Dr John Dunmore Lang as the best site for the Port of Brisbane, at last came into its own. Cargo ships, transports and destroyers assembled there prior to moving out of the bay in convoy – often up to twenty ships or more.
Small ships tied up to hastily constructed jetties, the remains of which can still be seen on the southern side of today’s Bribe Bridge. The Koopa and the Doomba had been requisitioned for service in the RAN, and the Bribe Island ferry service discontinued.
Caloundra, though not cleared of civilians, became a garrison town, with Army training camps and artillery and rifle rangers occupying Ballinger’s Hill at the back of Dicky Beach. Field guns and howitzers fired hundreds of rounds into the swampy ground around Lake Currimundi.
The area, after the war was divided up as a housing estate, it became Battery Hill, taking many if its street names from the names of guns and other military hardware.
Caloundra’s primary school became its wartime Battalions Headquarters, and pupils who had not been evacuated attended school at the Scout Den in two shifts. The School of Arts was an entertainment centre for soldiers. The US Army had a radar training school at Caloundra with a permanent staff of 200 hundred men continually training 600 or more troops; civilian homes were commandeered to house them.

At 4.10am of 12 May 1943 the hospital ship Centaur, bound from Sydney to Port Moresby was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine off Cape Moreton and caught fire and sank within three minutes.
Of a total complement of 363,299 were lost. No patients were being ferried and the ship had lights ablaze. One of the survivors, Sydney nurse Ellen Savage was awarded a George Medal for Heroism. They are commemorated by a plaque at Centaur Park on Wickham Head at Caloundra.
The Caloundra RSL hold the annual ANZAC Dawn Service at Centaur Park overlooking Bribe – a service to test the tear ducts.

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