About the Hide

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About the Site

You are probably wondering why I have taken you to the end of a road…  but look down… there amongst the rocks! Can you see the remnants of wooden piers as well as concrete wharf foundation structures sticking out of the water, especially at low tide?

Now look across the river, directly opposite. Do you see the post remnants in the sand? Also check just above the line of rocks over there for remains of an old boiler sticking out of the scrub? Both where you are and the site opposite were major wharfs with 10 ton steam operated cranes, built by the NSW Public Works Department (PWD). Fingal is seen a few kms up river.

While you are enjoying the river view consider this…. Tweed Heads was once a fairly major port. All sorts of products came in and out, and in the early days of the settlement the only way to do this was via ship. However, the river was wide, the bar unstable and prone to change, and sandy shoals would move in, cutting the channels. 

At the end of the 19th century, it was considered that if they artificially narrowed the river then the outgoing tides would help scour the sand from the river. Training walls on both the northern and southern sides would help stabilize the bar, or so they hoped. 

It was done in two stages with the first stage being the river walls built using material from a quarry at Fingal from 1891 to around 1901. The second stage, 1900 to 1904, used this Greenbank Island crane wharf to load material from the Pt Danger quarry onto barges. This was for the construction of the breakwaters on both sides of the river mouth itself. Problem being the river mouth was subject to heavy ocean wave action, so the breakwaters needed larger boulders than used in the river walls.

The Point Danger quarry offered a good supply of large columnar basalt boulders suitable for the ocean breakwaters. The Pt Danger quarry was the cliffs under the 1971 built Captain Cook Memorial Lighthouse honouring the bicentenary of James Cook’s voyage up the east coast in 1770 – there was previously no lighthouse on Point Danger. Fingal Head, with Cook Island and the dangerous reefs out from there, had the regional lighthouse from the 1870s.

Pt Danger quarry boulders were placed on tramway trucks which were then horse drawn to this Greenbank Island crane wharf where you are standing. Broadly speaking, the tramway route from the Pt Danger quarry was along parts of present day Coral St, and across to the main thoroughfare through town. In 1900 everything to the east of that road, mainly Greenbank Island, was semi-submerged wetlands and only fully reclaimed in the 1960s to allow the present day major commercial and residential use. The tramway crossed a narrow waterway between the town centre and Greenbank Island, about level with today’s Empire Lane, near Woolworths, then headed to this Greenbank Island crane wharf. The crane lifted the rocks from the tramway wagons into barges which were towed directly across the river, roughly 250 metres, to the Letitia Spit crane wharf. There the boulders were lifted back onto tram trucks to be hauled by horses to the southern breakwater tip head.  

The tramway ceased in 1904, although improvements to the walls continued at various times over subsequent years. With the previous town wharf opposite the hotel in Wharf St, near present day Jack Evans Boat Harbour, becoming inaccessible by around 1916 due to sand build up, river steamers and coastal traders began using the Crane Wharf and later another wharf at Boyds Bay.

Despite efforts to keep the shipping channels clear by dredging, ships were still being stranded on shoals or simply wreaked on the bar. The North Coast Steamship’s 544-ton twin screw steamer Tyalgum was wreaked at the river mouth on 25 August 1939, just before World War 2. By the 1930s there was also a decent road to Murwillumbah which linked up to the North Coast rail line. The end of the 1930s spelled the end of the coastal steamers and Tweed River as a shipping port. The wharf itself was demolished in 1952.

Also worth noting, that from the early 1970s till mid-2024, the Tweed District Hospital was just behind you. A replacement hospital has been built opposite TAFE NSW at Kingscliff.