The Way We Were: The Queensland town that just disappeared

Sawmills were vital in the building of our young state but for the men who worked there, each day could have been their last. One such thriving place just north of Brisbane is now merely a few chimneys, rotting foundations and a small cemetery.

IT was a chill winter’s morning on July 29, 1873, and a group of workers were warming themselves around the boiler at a sawmill on the banks of Lake Cootharaba.

Most of their mates had already retired to their humpies for breakfast, but Patrick Tierney, Patrick Molloy and his brother Phelim, and Joseph White were in the yard warming up. Charles Long was sitting in a loft above them and the mill’s two boilers.

It was about 8.30am when Long noticed the larger boiler was beginning to bulge and shake. It was their first and only indication of the catastrophe to follow.

“The boiler’s bursting,” Long cried out as he tried to escape.

His terror-stricken companions at once ran in different directions, but before any of them could get out of the way, the boiler appeared to fall forward, and burst with an explosion that could be heard 5km away.

The air filled with fragments of iron, brick, and wood, along with hot water and steam. The chimney stack tumbled, and the roof of the boiler shed was blown to pieces.

Long, a carpenter, was blown to a height of almost 20m and died instantly.

“When his body was afterwards found among the ruins it was greatly disfigured, and denuded of all clothing, only his belt remaining round his waist, while the pouch belonging to it, and containing the deceased’s watch, was picked up some 45m away,” a magisterial inquiry was told the following day.

Noosa XC Historic Photos from the Noosa region... Lake Cootharaba Tour Boats c1937

Tierney, a bullock driver, was last to get away. Part of the boiler fell on him and he was covered with boiling water.

“When he was picked up he was quite senseless. It is feared that the dreadful injuries he received are of such a nature as to afford little hope of his recovery.”

White was severely scalded, most bones in his body were broken and his leg had to be amputated at the knee.

Phelim Molloy, who was seated at the stokehole, was hit by boiling water and had his foot blown off by a fragment of metal. Patrick was severely scalded. Only a year earlier, their other brother Thomas, had been a victim of a boiler explosion at the Union Saw Mills in Maryborough.

The injured men were dragged from the debris and carried into a humpy. When the doctor arrived from Gympie almost 12 hours later, he found their injuries so severe they could not be moved.

Only Patrick Molloy would survive the blast, despite his scalded skin peeling from his body.

The sawmill was owned by McGhie, Luya and Company, and a small company settlement had grown up around it on the banks of Lake Cootharaba at Elanda Point.

Logs arrived from Tin Can Bay, the Burnett and “Fraser’s” Island to be processed and the sawn timber was then floated down the Noosa River on pontoons for loading on to steamers bound for Brisbane.

About 60 families lived near the mill until it closed in 1892 when the abundant timber resources began to run out and railway had replaced river transport.

The settlement, known as Mill Point, at one time rivalled Tewantin, 25km away.

There was a blacksmith and a carpenter’s shop, workmen’s houses, a large store, butchery, stables and boathouses.

The well-stocked store offered all kinds of goods, “at as reasonable rates as in Brisbane” while the carpenter’s shop in 1877 held “a great variety of the most beautiful timbers prepared specially for the forthcoming intercolonial exhibition”.

“There appeared nothing wanting to complete the comfort of all connected with the establishment,” Governor Normanby said in 1872. He found the mill and its equipment to be among the finest in the colony.

“Ingenious machinery” drew huge logs directly from the water to a platform level with the vertical saw, “thus saving time and labour considerably”.

After the disaster, the worst in Noosa’s history, the mill also became one of the safest. The tragedy soon led to every boiler in the colony being fitted with a government-approved safety valve.

By the 1940s, the once thriving township of Mill Point had all but disappeared. In 1956, it inspired poet Judith Wright to write Graves at Mill Point, about life as she imagined it during its heyday.

Today, only a few chimneys, and rotting foundations, and a small cemetery remain and the site is heritage listed.

Remnants of old boilers lie rusting on the shore. Pieces of heavy machinery sink into the sandy soil and a line of stout old pylons reaches out into the lake.

But it is said that four men rest on warm Elanda Point overlooking Lake Cootharaba, where tour boats carry holidaymakers who still appreciate the clear waters and “noble scrubs” that have inspired visitors for 150 years.