For at least 16 souls struck down in the 1900 plague outbreak in Brisbane, Gibson Island was their final resting place. There were children - seven-week-old Lucy Stone, three-year-old Gladys Ballard and 12-year-old Oliver Goldsmith Lonergan. They were buried alongside people marginalised by society such as “mendicant” Jemima Warnock and “lunatic” William Lee. Two 18-year-olds - “Young Man Jones” and Richard Shanahan - were buried there along with older plague victims including commission agent John Daniels, Oliver Goldsmith Lonergan’s neighbour Mrs Roche and teacher W. E. Walker, whose health had been failing after he developed tongue cancer.

“The patient having been certified to as suffering from plague, the authorities came to remove the remains. The anguished mother, however, clung to the body … With some difficulty, but with tact and tenderness, the officers managed to get the remains away.”

“At the house where the boy lived with his mother a pitiful scene was witnessed after the case had been reported,’’ it was noted at the time .

When officials arrived to take the body and transport it to Gibson Island for burial, his mother refused to part with her boy.

Fifteen-year-old David, who worked as a telegraph messenger, had fallen ill and died suddenly at the Spring Hill home he shared with his widowed mother and six siblings.

The "black death" scourge arrived in Brisbane in 1900, with 136 cases resulting in 57 deaths in that year.

It is unclear why authorities ignored the policy for dealing with plague victims in David’s case but the Fihelly family’s political clout is referenced in reports from the period.

The family home in Wedd Street, Spring Hill, was fumigated. David’s mother and six siblings Catherine, Michael, Margaret, Cornelius, Annie and John Arthur - a founder of the rugby league code in Queensland who represented the state and the country before he served as the member for Paddington in Queensland Parliament - were dispatched to the Colmslie Plague Hospital and placed under quarantine.

But authorities had an 11th-hour change of heart, placing David’s body in a coffin at the wharf and transporting him to Toowong Cemetery, where he was buried alongside his late father, Cornelius.

David Fihelly was set to join their number. The plague boat was readied to ferry the teenager’s body from North Quay Wharf to the island near the mouth of the Brisbane River.

Unemployed blacksmith Thos Moroney, umbrella mender Hugh McTafferty, insurance inspector Edward Henry McGregor, grocer James Lawrence Tranberg, bag and bale merchant John Mannion and Huet's bag and bale store employee Lizzie McLean rounded out the procession.

Today, the plague is most prevalent in Madagascar off the east coast of Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo in central Africa, and Peru in South America.

The World Health Organisation estimates “black death” caused more than 50 million deaths in Europe during the 14th century.

Queensland recorded annual outbreaks of the plague - a disease usually associated with medieval times - from 1900 to 1909. It re-emerged 12 years later when there were 166 cases and almost half proved fatal.

Creation of Queensland’s first health department was one of the positive changes that stemmed from the 1900 plague outbreak, according to specialist librarian Joan Bruce. Credit:Tammy Law

“Things I’ve read talk about backyards littered with kitchen scraps and waste food. Under one big produce store, they had dug out several feet of sewage-sodden soil as part of their clean-up operations.’’

“It was almost Dickensian in the poorer areas,’’ she said.

It was an era of inner-city slums and squalor, according to State Library of Queensland specialist librarian Joan Bruce, who pointed out there were no systems in place to collect human waste and rubbish.

“Cases of plague have occurred along the course of this sewer, and, though their chronological order does not show it, there is a complete chain of cases commencing in the neighbourhood of the wharf and the embouchure of the sewer, and including those along its course to the district in which the drain commences,’’ the report stated.

Clusters of plague cases were recorded near old and defective sewers across the city, particularly one that collected drainage from the Spring Hill-Wickham Terrace area and emptied into the Brisbane River under Collin’s Wharf at Petrie’s Bight.

In Brisbane, the stowaways spread the disease from the wharves to inner-city suburbs via subterranean “highways” as detailed in Report on Plague in Queensland 1900-1907 by Dr "Bertie" Burnett Ham.

Plague was shipped to Queensland in 1900 on vessels from Sydney carrying rats to ports dotted along the Queensland coastline.

Queensland’s last reported plague case was in 1922, according to a report by the Queensland government’s Office of Economic and Statistical Research.

Sanitary inspectors and rat-catching teams were dispatched to the Brisbane streets. It is estimated that tens of thousands of rats were destroyed. Amateurs cashed in too when officials placed a bounty - reportedly between two or six shillings per dozen - on dead rats. Companies seized the economic opportunity, with R.T. Gargett & Co offering the “Patent Folding Vapour Bath Cabinet” - a “Turkish bath in your own home” to keep customers free from bubonic plague by cleaning the body and removing all impurities from the system.

“Vessels from the south were poled out from the quays, their hawsers tarred and protected, their gangways watched all day and removed at night, their cargoes refused or fumigated, their passengers examined, their rats destroyed, and every other possible precaution was adopted to exclude the scourge," he wrote.

Trains were stopped at the border and passengers subjected to “rigid examination”, Dr David Wield wrote in Reminiscences of the Plague Panic of 1900 published in the Australasian Medical Gazette.

Destroying rats was one of the measures to thwart the spread of plague in Brisbane. Credit:State Library of Queensland

Ms Bruce says officials initially went “berserk”, burning down the homes of plague victims and erecting palisades around properties visited by the infection.

As the "black death" panic set in, authorities scrambled to deal with the epidemic.

“It is likely, however, that the communities of rats along the course of the sewer were infected from the wharf rats entering this highway, and, from the resulting local diffusion, cases among human beings occurred in the neighbourhood.”

When a person was struck down with the plague, fumigation crews thoroughly cleaned their home and those who had contact with the plague victim were placed under quarantine at the hastily established Colmslie Plague Hospital in many instances.

“You could visit your loved ones at the hospital if they were sick,’’ Ms Bruce says.

“You would have to be disinfected on the way in and the way out and very few people availed themselves of the opportunity more than once.’’

In the 1900 epidemic, patient zero was 21-year-old James Drevesen, who worked as a carter for a firm of produce merchants. He plied his trade between the markets and the wharves, where it was believed he contracted bubonic plague.

“It was a singular coincidence that the first case of plague in a man in Brisbane and the first case in Sydney should both have been van drivers or carters, employed in removing goods from the wharves where dead and plague-infected rats were subsequently found,’’ Dr Ham wrote in his report.

James Drevesen, the first person struck down in the 1900 outbreak in Brisbane, lived in the timber cottage on the left. Credit:Composite: State Library of Queensland and Tammy Law

Mr Drevesen lived with his wife of three months on Hawthorne Street, off the Ipswich Road, at Woolloongabba. Their cottage was placed under “strict quarantine” and disinfected while their bedding and curtains were burned. Police manned an iron barricade erected on the street.

After seven weeks in the Colmslie, he emerged weak and thin but on the mend and with £20 compensation in his pocket.

The hospital - near the corner of Thynne and Lytton roads at Morningside - took its name from Colmslie House built by Captain William Cairncross. He was “apparently of English aristocracy”, “delighted in good horse flesh” and was an “active churchman” who travelled around town in a “handsome pair of blue roan harness horses with carriage and footman in charge”, according to History of the Bulimba electorate 1859-1959.

Captain Cairncross owned the Bread, Fancy Bread, and Biscuit Bakers and Confectioners store on the corner of Queen and Albert streets, where Hungry Jack's stands today. Captain Cairncross and his wife Elizabeth Edmonstone, a talented dressmaker, lived on the premises with their daughters until he retired in 1853 to make the family home in Morningside.

Matriarch Elizabeth Cairncross (nee Edmonstone) and three of the couple’s seven daughters. Credit:State Library of Queensland

The sprawling Colmslie House - complete with an observatory so Captain Cairncross could relay weather observations and shipping news to officials - was built in 1881 on a 40-acre paddock stretching to the bank of the Brisbane River.

The Joint Health Board deemed the Cairncross property was a suitable site for a plague hospital for the afflicted and their close contacts so the Government reportedly purchased it for £3100. It was a troublesome project.

“The work went so slowly that in some three months all that had been provided for the accommodation of the possible patients and their hospital staff was an isolated country house situated in a large paddock on the banks of the Brisbane River, about six miles from the centre of the city,’’ Dr Wield wrote.

“The house was supposed to be fit for the administrative block of the proposed hospital, while the wards and nurses’ quarters and kitchen were represented by frames, and little more, of three small wooden buildings in a low-lying part of the paddock.’’

Ground and first floor plans for the stately Cairncross home. Credit:National Archives of Australia

Authorities rented two small cottages on an adjoining paddock and hastily fashioned small tents using sail cloth and saplings to prepare for patients at the hospital. It was accessible by a private road and the “decayed and worm-eaten timbers of an ancient pier” from the river.

When the first patient arrived, the builders and labourers panicked and considered “instant flight”. “Work was on the instant stopped, and a helter-skelter rout was about to begin, and was delayed only by the obstacle of the ambulance litter blocking the way to safety,’’ according to Dr Wield.

“There the litter had to stop while a medical officer addressed the fear-stricken crowd and persuaded all but a few cravens to continue their work. As soon as the patient had been conveyed to his tent, a barrier of rope, soon replaced by barbed wire, around a space some 20 yards square cut him off with his attendants from communication with the outer world. Yellow flags marked the cordon or plague area, which no one without special permit was allowed to approach.’’

It was a “rude welcome” to the Colmslie Plague Hospital for those who had close contact with plague victims, according to Dr Wield. They arrived on the “plague bus”, were stripped naked, bathed in antiseptics and provided with “light garments”. They received hot coffee and “other restoratives” before they were marched to a cottage and waited until their clothes were disinfected and fit to wear again.

Hospital staff had a carbolic bath twice daily to ward off infection.

As the plague spread, Colmslie became a large encampment with about a dozen tents, the ramshackle pier was repaired and a pontoon was attached to accommodate the plague boat: a sailing boat with its masts and gear removed to make way for two stretchers.

The public interest in the condition of plague victims was sated by a bulletin posted three times a day on the door pillars of Town Hall.

Officialdom decided those who succumbed to black death in 1900 would be interred on Gibson Island - a “long, low stretch of sand, thickly covered with mangroves, bush, and trees” - off the south bank of the Brisbane River and about 15 kilometres from the city.

Most of the mangroves have made way for heavy industry on Gibson Island. Credit:Tammy Law

“A patch of ground on the highest part of the island was cleared by axe and fire. Men were sent from the hospital to dig some six-foot graves but at a lesser depth they came to water and there they had to stop,’’ Dr Wield wrote.

The mayor moved to allay community concerns that the makeshift plague graveyard could be inundated at high tide.

The plague victim’s body was wrapped in antiseptic-laced sheets before the deceased was placed in a coffin then filled with quicklime - a caustic substance that causes the body to quickly decay. After the lid was screwed shut, the coffin was carried to the riverbank and placed on a small boat until the arrival of the government steamer to tow the boat to Gibson Island.

“When the steamer arrived came the first complication,’’ according to Dr Wield.

“It brought orders that no one from the Plague Hospital was to board it so the medical officer and his men had either to sit in the punt with the coffin or get another boat and tow alongside.

“When Gibson Island was reached, only with the greatest difficulty was the coffin landed and the sad and solemn ceremony had to be hurried through owing to the lateness of the hour.

“The difficulties met with induced the government to hastily construct a landing pontoon near the island cemetery. After that, disembarkment was easy but many a time in squally weather the boat and punt came within an ace of being swamped.”

Three men lived on this “ghastly spot in the thick of the mangrove scrub” and their sole task was to bury plague victims. “People away across the river can hear them night and day singing for the very joy of being possessors of such comfortable billets. Eight bob a day for a whole year and nothing to do but sit and wait for plague corpses,’’ it was reported at the time.

Ms Bruce says islands were often used for quarantine purposes at the time.

“I think they were a bit caught short … when they had their first death at the plague hospital [in 1900],’’ she says.

“And they didn’t think it was safe to bury them in a cemetery.’’

Gibson Island was difficult to access and close to the Colmslie Plague Hospital.

“But in April 1901, they just calmly announced in the paper that they’d decided to cease burials on Gibson Island, so that was just a year,’’ she says.

The practice had stopped because it was deemed inhumane and a tax on the time of the Colmslie medical officer who attended the burials.

It was remarked at the time that Gibson Island should never be a place “required for cultivation or for dwelling”. “In this respect, it is well that the site of burial should be on an island and hereafter one monument may suffice to indicate how these buried ones fell, and where they all sleep till the great call.”

Once an island but now a peninsula, Gibson Island has cultural significance for Indigenous Australians. A bora ring - with an outer diameter of 10 metres and an inner diameter of four metres - was logged on the north-eastern part near the Brisbane River in 1964, according to Aboriginal Pathways: in Southeast Queensland and the Richmond River by John Gladstone Steele.

It was the home of a reclusive farmer in the 1880s, a resort complete with the Friend family’s kiosk opened in 1919, and a popular sports recreation ground in the 1920s, according to historian Chris Dawson. The island’s transformation into a heavy industry hub began in the 1950s with the opening of a power station.

Today, Gibson Island is an industrial hub. Credit:Tammy Law

A thin strip of mangroves on the Bulimba Creek side is the only visible reminder of the island environs encountered by those first grave diggers. Today, the undulating curve of the Gateway Bridge dwarfs the smokestacks on the island home to a fertiliser factory, a paper mill and recycling facility, an adhesives manufacturer and a sewage treatment plant.

Small boats now moor in the section of Bulimba Creek known as Aquarium Passage, which reflects the area’s history. Queensland’s first theme park, the Queensport Aquarium, opened in August 1889 but closed a few years later after flooding. Credit:Tammy Law

High fences prevent visitors from exploring the island behind its spine - Paringa Road - alongside a narrow rail line that seemingly reached its use-by date years ago and is surrendering its ground to the grass. As planes arriving and departing fly overhead, crows and ibis dart between the trucks bound for the factories.

In partnership with industry, Bulimba Creek Catchment Coordinating Committee has launched the Gibson Island Rehabilitation Project. Credit:Tammy Law

The 1900 plague victims were buried at the highest point of Gibson Island near a cluster of trees but months of searching has failed to uncover a map of a makeshift cemetery or evidence the remains were removed.

The Brisbane City Council advises it only has burial records for council-managed cemeteries and these burials occurred before City Hall was involved with the island.

One of the island’s major tenants, Queensland Urban Utilities, is fascinated by the history of Gibson Island, which is home to its third large sewage treatment plant.

“While we’re aware there was a plague cemetery somewhere on the island, we understand the exact location is unknown,” spokeswoman Michelle Cull says.

“We’ve never come across any evidence of graves on the treatment plant site.

“According to an old newspaper story from May 1900, the cemetery was on the highest part of the island, above the high-water mark.”

The Department of Natural Resources, Mines and Energy identified the island’s highest natural point on open ground between the factories in an area off limits to the public. The department detected two “mounds” on the island, which could potentially be man-made.

Where are the graves? The Queensland Department of Natural Resources, Mines and Energy has identified possible locations. Credit:Department of Natural Resources, Mines and Energy

The dearth of official records detailing the location of the makeshift cemetery and who is buried in that graveyard is unsurprising, according to Ms Bruce.

“They hastily towed the bodies there in a boat behind the government tug, buried them, (then) the medical officer read a service because they couldn’t get any clerics to come there,’’ she says.

“Then they all hurriedly went home, back to whatever else they were doing.

“I don’t even know whether they erected anything to mark the graves and, even more importantly, what they would do at Colmslie was wrap the bodies in carbolic-soaked sheets, then they would put them in lime-slaked coffins.

“So once you’ve got lime-slaked coffins buried less than six feet down in a very watery … environment on a low-lying island, how long do you think the remains are going to last?”

In 1900, there was a “lot of drama” from families who wanted to visit their loved ones’ graves or remove their remains from Gibson Island.

“But it seemed … after a while that died down as well,” she says.