Point Lookout

Passenger ferry passing the vehicle ferry

Main Beach from Point Lookout

Blue Lake

North Gorge

Point Lookout

Flinders Beach

Amity Point

North Stradbroke is the largest of Moreton Bay's islands, covering 27 530 hectares. Affectionately referred to as "Straddie", the elongated sand island of North Stradbroke shields much of the southern part of Moreton Bay and the smaller islands from the ocean swells. The permanent population the island is quite small, but the number of people on the island swells significantly during the holiday season. There is no bridge to the island and the only access is by vehicular or passenger ferries leaving from Cleveland.

Cylinder Beach

There are three townships on the island. Dunwich is the largest and has most of the island's services including a school, medical centre, local museum and university marine research station. Point Lookout (referred to locally as 'the point') is on the surf side of the island and is the major tourist destination in the holiday season. The third is Amity Point which is much smaller and a popular fishing spot on the island. Flinders Beach is a small settlement of mostly holiday houses located on the main beach between Amity and Point Lookout.
North Stradbroke Island is known for its long clean white beaches in the east, its peacefulness due to a long isolation and its rich diversity of nature varying from whales passing Point Lookout to the many wild orchids in the interior of the island.
The island has numerous freshwater lakes including; Ibis Lagoon, Black snake Lagoon, Welsby Lagoon, Lake Kounpee, Brown Lake and the beautiful Blue Lake situated in Blue Lake National Park. There are a number of man made (mining) water bodies including the Key Hole Lakes, Yarraman Lake, Herring Lagoon and Palm Lagoon. In some areas there are extensive swamplands such as the long Eighteen Mile Swamp and another behind Flinders Beach. Other notable features of the island include Adder Rock between Amity and Point Lookout and on the southern tip of the island is Swan Bay and an area of very large sand dunes.
The island is managed and administered by the North Stradbroke Island Water Resource Coordination Group and the Department of Natural Resources and Water.
Straddie is located on the outer edge of Brisbane's Moreton Bay, and a variety of whales pass close by this Queensland island and shelter just off the many beaches and in Moreton Bay itself. After a brief rest the Humpbacks, Southern Wright and occasionally Blue Whales move on to their Hervey Bay and Whitsunday breeding grounds.

History: The native name for the island is Minjerribah but in 1827 Captain Henry John Rous, who had the title of Viscount Dunwich, commander of HMS Rainbow the first British ship of war to enter Moreton Bay, named the island after his father the Earl of Stradbroke, the town after his title, the entrance channel after himself and even gave his boat a guernsey with the naming of Rainbow Beach. However three shipwrecked sailors, Thomas Pamphlett, John Finnegan and Richard Parsons, spent time on Stradbroke Island after they were washed ashore in 1823. The local Aboriginal people supplied them with food and shelter and even gave them a canoe to help them on their way. Before these three, Matthew Flinders called in at Stradbroke Island for fresh water and also mapped a large section of Moreton Bay. Flinders was impressed by the Stradbroke Aborigines' health and hospitality. Well known local historian, Thomas Welsby, records an Aboriginal oral tradition that there was an even earlier contact with European shipwreck survivors who walked into one of the Aboriginal camps after their ship was wrecked on the ocean side of Stradbroke Island. This tradition states that one of the men's names was Juan and the other's was Woonunga. In 1890 a member of the Campbell family, one of Stradbroke's oldest mixed blood families, told Welsby that the remains of the ship were still visible in the 18 Mile Swamp and that the remains were of English oak. This story gives rise to a local legend that the remains of a Spanish or Portuguese shipwreck known as the Stradbroke Island Galleon exist somewhere in the 18 Mile Swamp.
During the 1960s sand mining operations began mining the islands frontal dunes. Mining moved into the interior of the island in the late 1960s and increased in scale and size. As an alternative, development of the island for seaside residential use was mooted and in 1970 a bridge from the mainland via Russell Island was under serious consideration by the Queensland government. The Queensland government also proposed a large scale redevelopment of the island in the mid 1980's which would have seen the population of the island increase 10 fold. This proposal was never followed through when the incumbent government lost office.
From the 1960s to the 1980s sand miners mined the frontal dunes of the ocean beach from Jumping Pin to Point Lookout. This mining activity destroyed numerous ancient Aboriginal middens and campsites in the sheltered areas behind the frontal dunes. There is also strong anecdotal evidence that in the 1960s one of the early mining companies destroyed a shipwreck located in the sand dunes near Jumping Pin which may have been the reputed Stradbroke Galleon. There are several accounts from sand mining employees of unusual artifacts being found during dredging operations.
Mineral sands and silica sands at Myora Mine, near Dunwich, are currently being mined from the surface while rutile, zircon and ilmenite are dredged from the Yarraman Mine on the north of the island and the Enterprise Mine on the south of the island by Consolidated Rutile Limited. According to the Stradbroke Island Management Organisation (an environmental watch-dog organisation) two-thirds of the island is covered by mining leases.

The island has the region's oldest archaeological site at Wallen Wallen Creek near Dunwich. Research at the site has provided evidence of human activity beginning at least 21 000 years ago. Surviving aboriginal shell middens can be found scattered behind the sand dunes along the Main Beach. Because Stradbroke Island (and Moreton Bay) only came into existence in its current form when sea levels rose after the last Ice Age, most Aboriginal settlement sites around the coastline date from around six to eight thousand years ago. White settlement of Stradbroke began in the 1820s at Amity Point and Dunwich. A pilot station was established for ships entering Moreton Bay through the South Passage.

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