hornibook

How the bridge appeared in the 1970's

dunedoo Thank you Peter for sharing this photograph.

Hornibrook Bridge, the facts and history Officially opened by the Governor, Sir Leslie Orme Wilson on Friday, October 4th, 1935, Hornibrook Bridge or Hornibrook Highway (technically just a viaduct) spanned between Sandgate and Clontarf. A distance of 2,686 meters, making it Australia’s longest bridge at the time. Building construction of monstrous proportions, the bridge builders (Manuel Hornibrook known as MR) relied heavily on local resources, for example, the 1746 corbels supporting the decking and were part of the 2.5 million cubic feet of timber used to build the Bridge, cut from forests north-west of Redcliffe in Conondale, Mapleton and Kilcoy. Aside from being the longest bridge in Australia, Hornibrook was also innovative in being one of the first privately owned toll bridges in Queensland. Tolls were collected on the northern entrance of the bridge, with the toll master living in a house built nearby. Due to popularity and to handle the increase in traffic, Houghton Highway was built to replace the Hornibrook Bridge in 1979, before a third bridge the Ted Smout Memorial Bridge, which was opened in 2010. Despite these new bridge-building projects, the original Hornibrook Bridge portals, north and south, still stand today and are heritage listed. The northern portal at Clontarf is known as the Hornibrook Pier. An essay by Manuel Hornibrook's granddaughter, Julie Hornibrook about the Hornibrook Highway can be accessed on the State Library of Queensland website. Source: www.visitmoretonbayregion.com.au/natural-attractions/horn...

There is one final way the Hornibrook Highway lives on and that is as part of the community’s intangible heritage – in story, memory, and identity. Popular poet and former Redcliffe resident, Rupert McCall, alludes to this symbiosis between the bridge as a physical site and as a site of enduring cultural meaning in his verse, The Boy on the Bridge Returns (1997): The city doesn’t know me when the Hornibrook’s below me, It’s a homely kind of journey that I’ve come to understand, It’s an ocean breeze that cleanses something stressful from my lenses, My wheels are heading north towards Peninsulated land. The Bay lies like a mirror – non-reflective of its terror, And the blue horizon meets it where the tower comes to view Beneath a seagull-studded ceiling – it conveys a special feeling, And I wonder in my wildest dreams if Oxley felt it too. While the bridge itself is now gone, the Art Deco “tower” still “comes to view” on the journey from Brisbane to Redcliffe, standing as a tribute to local history, the Hornibrook legend, and the flourishing of modernity in Queensland in the early twentieth century. Source: queenslanddecoproject.com/2015/10/04/hornibrook-highway/

Hornibrook Bridge is a heritage-listed mostly-demolished road bridge on the Hornibrook Highway over Hays Inlet at Bramble Bay from Brighton, City of Brisbane to Clontarf, Moreton Bay Region, Queensland, Australia. It was designed by Manuel Hornibrook and built from 1932 to 1935 by Manuel Hornibrook. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 7 October 1994. Handsome art-deco concrete abutment arches frame the entry and exit approaches. Construction of the bridge was important for the growth of the Redcliffe City peninsula and made the commute to Brisbane shorter and quicker, increasing population growth and the number of visitors to the seaside location. The bridge was known colloquially by the locals as the "Humpity Bump" because the road surface of the bridge was so buckled. During king tides, waves would crash into (and sometimes onto) the bridge spraying the cars as they crossed. The bridge was operated and maintained by a private company and a toll was applied until 1975, with toll booths located on the Clontarf (north) end. The Hornibrook Bridge was the first of three bridges to cross Bramble Bay. The second bridge is the publicly funded (non-tolled) Houghton Highway bridge, which was built with the intention of duplicating the crossing capacity of the two-lane Hornibrook Bridge in the 1970s, but the upgrading of the original Hornibrook Bridge was subsequently found to be uneconomic. The bridge closed to traffic in 1979 with the opening of the Houghton Highway, which had been intended to provide a duplicated crossing. The third bridge, the Ted Smout Memorial Bridge opened to traffic in July 2010, delivering the desired capacity increase and resulting in the demolition of the original Hornibrook Bridge, which had been used as a pedestrian and bicycle-only bridge since 1979. (en) Source: dbpedia.org/page/Hornibrook_Bridge