Tiny island in the bay

King Island was a small island off Wellington Point that was a popular Moreton Bay tourist destination in the early 1900s. For a couple of years during that era, the Phillips family lived on the island because one of their children was advised to bathe daily in the salt water to ease her polio symptoms.

King Island, Wellington Point, Brisbane

A couple of decades later, poultry farmers illegally collected the sand from King Island for shell grit. In fact, my grandfather collected sand grit from a different beach during the depression as a way of earning a bit of money. During WW11, King Island was unfortunately used as a target for bombing practice by the U.S.

The muddy side of King Island

Today, it’s a peaceful island where birds congregate and hikers venture over the sand from the mainland at low tide.