41. Pig, the Dugong

Like many of the original European settlers, I love the idea that there are thousands of islands to explore in Australia.  In Moreton Bay itself there are as many as 360 and I am curious about all of them. One of these islands, in fact the one I can see most mornings in the distance during my walk to the Shorncliffe Pier, is Moreton Island. It is only on rainy and hazy days that it disappears from my view.

Moreton Island is a large island, whose history I’ve been keen to learn more about since moving to this area six years ago. Recently I did some research on it, and I found that there are literally hundreds of sources which provide a great deal of information. In this blog post I will try to bring to life a few stories that I found, which I thought were interesting. Stories about a dugong pup, about a whaling station, about the Ngugi people who inhabited the island for thousands of years and about one of the ships which ran onto the rocks close to the island.

To start off, however, let’s just note a few facts. I know that my readers in Holland would like me to give them some basic information, such as the fact that most of the island is a national park and that it has 4 townships, with Tangalooma being the biggest with roughly 300 permanent residents. Other much smaller settlements are Bulwer, Cowan Cowan and Kooringal.

Moreton Island is located 58 km north-east of Brisbane. It can be reached from Brisbane by vehicle ferry and via passenger service directly to the Tangalooma resort. There are also two small airstrips on it. The roads are unsealed and 4-wheel drive vehicles are used to travel beyond the resort to other parts of the island. Tourists visiting the island greatly outnumber the permanent residents.

That’s probably enough facts for the time being. Let’s talk about the interesting features, such as the island having several large freshwater lakes, with the most popular being named “Blue Lagoon”, just like the controversial 1980 film of the same name. And with these lakes came the birds, more than 180 different species, and with the birds, the bird watchers.

There are also salt-water lagoons on the island, and this is where my tale about Pig begins. “Pig” is the name of a dugong who lived in one of these lagoons for a while. It’s a great story which was published in Ocean Road Magazine in 2018.

“What is a dugong?”, I hear some of my readers ask. Dugongs are also called “sea cows” because they are herbivorous and, like cows, they graze on grass, which for the dugongs is sea grass, which grows in certain shallow parts of Moreton Bay. Dugongs can grow quite big, up to 3 metres long, and can weigh as much as 400 kilograms. They are mammals, which means that they need to come up for air and can only hold their breath underwater for a limited time (up to 11 minutes). They are intelligent, friendly and social animals, with a lifespan of about 60 years.

“Pig” was the youngest dugong calf ever hand-raised in captivity. When he was about 3 years old, he was transferred to a saltwater lagoon on Moreton Island, to get him used to fending for himself.  When, several months later, he was released into Moreton Bay, he was fitted with a satellite tracker harness. Less than 3 days after his release this harness was found, showing signs of an attack by a shark. Pig himself had disappeared and was nowhere to be found.

The good news is that, 8 months later, he reappeared, washed up near the southern end of Moreton Island. However, he was injured and malnourished and in a pretty poor state. The decision was made to take him to the Sea World refuge for treatment.

Pig became a great attraction and thankfully he fully recovered. In 2008 he was transferred to a much larger pool at Sea Life Sydney, where he was happily joined by a female dugong, Wuru. I gather (but like most of the information in this blog post, I can’t vouch for this) he still lives there today, eating copious quantities of cos lettuce, about 30kg every day.

While Pig’s story had a happy ending, the story about the Ngugi people did not end well. Prior to white people settling on Moreton Island, the Ngugi people had lived there for more than 2000 years.  They had hunted and they had fished and they are remembered for the way in which they worked together with dolphins. They attracted dolphins by slapping their spears on the water and digging gutters with their spears in the shallow water  and the dolphins would then move the fish towards them, enabling the fishermen to scoop them up in their nets.

Sadly, soon after the arrival of the first white visitors to the island (in 1823) many Ngugi people died from introduced diseases such as smallpox. Others were massacred! One report which I have read refers to an ambush orchestrated by a Captain Clunie, when many of them were killed. By 1850 no Ngugi people remained on the island, the last survivors having been forced to relocate to nearby Stradbroke Island.

Another story about Moreton Island concerns whaling. The township of Tangalooma was the site where a thriving whaling station operated between 1952 to1962. More than 6000 humpback whales were caught and processed there as they made their way past the island to the north, having come from the Antarctic. So many whales were killed that the population declined to less than 500. Thankfully, in 1965, humpback whales were listed as a “Protected Species” and whaling stopped. Whaling has since been replaced by whale watching. The old whaling station in Tangalooma is now a Marine Education and Conservation Centre.

There are many shipwrecks close to Moreton island. Some have been there for more than a century, like the clipper “Young Australia”, which ran onto rocks off Cape Moreton. Its voyage from London had probably taken about 15 weeks when she arrived in Moreton Bay. She was only a very small ship by today’s standards, with a net tonnage of 767, but would have carried well over 200 passengers. Unfortunately, the “Young Australia” was wrecked shortly after she began the return voyage from Brisbane to Liverpool. However, all of those who sailed on her were able to get safely back on land and to walk to the pilot station near the settlement of Bulwer.

At no time, when I first saw Moreton island in the distance during my walks, did I foresee that there would be so much information available from so many different sources about this beautiful and mysterious island. Of course, not all of it is necessarily accurate or true, and I’m sure that there are many more stories to be told. I hope that some of you (and I include myself in this) will go looking for them and enjoy them.

 As for me, I can assure you that I will never forget “Pig”, our dugong pup.

O.P.

P.S. Next Sunday’s post will be about Sandgate in the 1880s and how a new train line to Brisbane made it such a popular day-trip destination.