Islanding in Moreton Bay

Abstract

The idea of an island is simple enough: a piece of land completely surrounded by water. Unlike the continent whose extremities are sometimes arbitrary, or the nation whose boundaries are as much political as geographic, the island is a binary idea. There is water, and there is land. The island is land, and the clarity of it gives rise to an island's very identity and story. But at the southern end of Moreton Bay, 30 kilometres south east of Brisbane, where more than a dozen small low-lying, mosquito-blighted locks of land guard the mouth of the Logan River, there are four larger islands whose stories are not at all clear. Instead, their status as "land" at all has often been under a mark. Their history reminds us that the word "island" is a verb as well as a noun. Islands come and go, and are forever being made and unmade.