hornibook

Opening Day The Highway Opening on 4th October 1935 was a grand event for the longest bridge in Australia, opened by the Governor, Sir Leslie Orme Wilson. Several of the dignitaries also made speeches and some memorable quotes are recorded. In his speech, MR declared – “The hour has come!” After many challenges, it was a profound moment to reach Opening Day. He summarised the challenges with the full effects of the Depression being felt but said that “every man on this job stuck by me in the most difficult times,” and that many thought they would never finish the job but that “only strengthened our backs.” He said that at times the weather made his heartache but felt “proud of every man who worked on this job,” and that it was the policy of his firm to reward the loyalty of its workforce by engaging them on further contracts (Hornibrook Highway Opened, Longest Viaduct in Australia, High Tributes to Contractor,14). How heartening this would have been for local people and their families during times of such low employment and it helps to understand the loyalty people felt to MR and the company over many years. His big challenges had been designed, finance, organisation, and timber supplies and all had been overcome (The New Gateway to Redcliffe and the Great North Coast, 1935)6. A procession of cars crossed the highway to Clontarf Headland, where the visitors were entertained by the Redcliffe Town Council. At 6 p.m. the collection of tolls began and 3000 cars crossed the first day (Hornibrook Highway,29). The celebrations were held only on the Redcliffe side as the first sod had been turned on the Sandgate side (Hornibrook Highway,30). Redcliffe also had an officially declared public holiday for Redcliffe (Hornibrook Highway,30) so all could join in the celebrations from school children, workers, families and community. Newspapers reported it was a beautiful day and the chairman of Hornibrook Highway Pty Ltd, Sir Edward Macartney, said the work of constructing the Highway, because of its nature and extent, was unique in Australia. Speaking of MR he said, "My company has found him to be a great man, whose first principle is a first-class job. His attitude towards the company and the undertaking has been very generous and very reasonable. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to work with him” (Hornibrook Highway Opened, Longest Viaduct in Australia, High Tributes to Contractor, 15)14. Sir Edward added, “…the Hornibrook Highway is a tribute to those men whose ability and unshakeable convictions successfully overcame the forces of public criticism, and even ridicule, and shaped a public opinion sufficiently powerful to bring about the successful registration of their objective” (The New Gateway to Redcliffe and the Great North Coast, 1935)6. The Governor announced, “To-day is a day on which, we might say, another page in the history of Queensland has been written. It might even be said that another page has been written in the history of Australia, because this is the longest bridge in the Commonwealth" (Hornibrook Highway Opened, Longest Viaduct in Australia, High Tributes to Contractor,14). The completion of the Highway also showed that Queensland proudly valued enterprise and vision, their own products and employment of their own people. They boasted that all products used in the bridge, except the steel, was produced in Queensland. A few years later when the Story Bridge was completed there was a similar boast, including that the steel was made in Australia so these projects contributed enormously to the image Queensland had forged for itself and its place in a competitive Australia. The Governor commented that some criticised the size of the project and that it was built too soon for demand. He defended the stance saying better to be too soon than too late. He added that only 33 years previously were nearly 200,000 fewer people in Brisbane than in 1935. He went on to ask “Who would dare predict how many will be in Brisbane 30 years from to-day?” They would all have been amazed to witness how much these communication links really did influence growth in the area and that, by 1965, the Brisbane population growth rate almost doubled from the previous 30 years to approx. 700,000 by 1965 so the Bridge capacity was well needed (ABS, 2008)16. An exciting moment of the Opening was when the Governor cut the ribbon, reportedly with a gold boomerang presented to him by MR. Amidst applause, he and his wife, Lady Wilson, were then driven in the lead vehicle of a procession of vehicles over the Bridge. They were welcomed on the Clontarf side by the Mayor, a Scottish pipe band, a guard of honor of war veterans, and 400 school children. A civic reception followed with much celebration and congratulations all around (Hornibrook Highway Opening, Big Programme of Celebrations,17). The Redcliffe Library holds a DVD that includes footage of the opening of the Highway and the gold boomerang can be seen on film. The choice of boomerang was surely symbolic of belief in the future of holidaymakers and others choosing to go over the Bridge to the peninsular and back again. From the: Hornibrook Highway essay by Julie Hornibrook www.slq.qld.gov.au/discover/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/...

Queensland Cement and LIme (QCL) began making concrete using crushed dead coral in lieu of lime . Full production started in 1937 and one of the first projects to use the coral mix was the portal on the southern approach of the Hornibrook Highway Bridge. The concrete was made at the factory at Darra, with the coral being transported from the Oxley Wharf (Brisbane River, Seventeen Mile Rocks) to the factory initially by trucks, then in the 1960s, by overhead, overland conveyor belt. Remnants of the Oxley Wharf and the conveyor belt can be seen at Rocks Riverside Park.

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/