Convicts & Colonials: Transport

The road to Ipswich
The famous song “The Road to Mandalay” refers, not to an actual road or track, but to the Irrawaddy River, the best route to take to reach Mandalay in Burma. In a similar way, the Bremer River was once the main road to Ipswich. The roads on land in early Queensland were rough dirt tracks which quickly became muddy and impassable in rainy weather. The trip by river was smooth, fast and usually reliable. Ipswich was located at the head of navigation and became the commercial centre of an important transport network. Goods brought up from Brisbane by river were transferred to bullock teams at Ipswich for the long slow trip to distant stations, while wool and other farm products were loaded for the trip downriver to the port.

Punts, sailboats and market boats
Punts or flat-bottomed boats were used on the river to carry heavy cargo. The first punt service began in late 1844 and immediately proved popular. A wool store had been built in Ipswich, and many settlers sent all or part of their wool clip to Brisbane by river - it was claimed that using the punt saved up to 10 days travel by bullock team on the poor road to Brisbane. As the distance by road was only 90km (about 45km each way), this claim seems surprising, even though there were almost no bridges at this time. Within a year, demand had increased so much that the river service was unable to cope. The situation improved in 1847, when Boyland and Reid, the ferrymen in South Brisbane, built another punt Mary Ann which could carry 100 bales of wool. They also built a wool store at Ipswich.

In the 1850s, Andrew Petrie put the punt Jenny Lind into service with George Holt as coxswain. He recalled that the chief up-river cargo included squatters’ stores, building materials and farm implements, while wool and tallow formed the chief downstream loading. Holt later bought his own punt and set up in competition with the Jenny Lind.

Punts were relatively cheap and easy to build, and offered opportunities for enterprising people such as the Spresser family who lived at Woodend near the coal mine owned by John Stevens. Jacob Spresser later recalled that his father Gottlieb and a friend Charley Brecht built a few punts. Gottlieb and another man Harry Wilkinson (known as “one-armed Wilkinson”) then used them to take coal down river to the wharves where it was transferred to the steamers “for their own use and for disposal elsewhere”. The punts had no engines and when steam vessels began to appear on the river, they were often towed.

The river steamers
Punts took several days for the trip between Ipswich and Brisbane. The time was dramatically reduced in 1846 when steam engines were introduced. The first paddle steamer to make the trip was Experiment. It had been operating in the Sydney area but was purchased by James Canning Pearce and transferred to Moreton Bay. On her first trip to Ipswich on 17 June 1846, Experiment went aground on a mud bank near Goodna because the boat’s pilot was not familiar with the river. She had to wait overnight until she could float off with the tide, and arrived in Ipswich at 1pm the next day to be met by a welcoming crowd and an enthusiastic man who played the bagpipes. Experiment eventually managed an average trip time of seven hours.

The boat was a great pioneer of the river, but was not a financial success. It required a considerable amount of refitting and repair and finally sank off Queen’s Wharf in Brisbane in February 1848. It was sold where it lay to Boyland & Reid who were able to raise it successfully, but it operated for only another year. Experiment was followed by other river steamers and during the busiest period, from 1846 to the late 1870s, at least 26 were used at various times on the Bremer River. Most were paddle steamers but a few were screw steamers i.e. they had propellers instead of paddles.