page_title: Petrie Bight
section_title: River wharfage
hierarchical_section_title: Petrie Bight / History / River wharfage
caption_attribution_description: English: View of Queen Street and the wharves on the Brisbane River, Brisbane, Queensland, ca.1943 View of the wharves on the Brisbane River. Customs House is apparent in the lower left of the image. Queen Street is visible in the centre of the photograph with the prominent Seppelts Wines building in the centre. An aeroplane (a Lockheed Lightning fighter aircraft) is in the sky above the city of Brisbane.
context_page_description: Petrie Bight is a reach of the Brisbane River in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. The small pocket of land to the north of the bight, centred on the area under the Story Bridge's northern point and around the Brisbane River to Customs House is also known as Petrie Bight; it falls within the suburbs of the Brisbane CBD and Fortitude Valley. However, land to the south of the reach Petrie Bight does not use that name, and is known by its suburb name of Kangaroo Point. Today, it is overpassed by the Story Bridge, and underpassed by the Clem7 Tunnel toll road.
context_section_description: In the early 1840s wharfage in Brisbane was concentrated along the South Brisbane Reach of the Brisbane River, but within a decade had extended to the Town Reach further downstream, which soon rivalled South Brisbane in terms of shipping activity. An 1849 decision to locate Brisbane's first purpose-built Customs House at the northern end of the Town Reach acted as the impetus for the development of wharves on this part of the river. The Commissariat Store below William Street, which had served as Brisbane's first customs facility, was replaced in 1850 by a new customs building on the site of the present Customs House in Queen Street, at Petrie's Bight. (This in turn was replaced in 1886-89 by the current building.) During the 1850s and 1860s, a number of shipping companies and private investors constructed wharves and warehouses between the Customs House and Alice Street, near the City Botanic Gardens.
  Construction of a Government wharf (Kennedy Wharf) at Petrie's Bight north of the Customs House commenced in 1875 was completed in 1877 and was leased to private shipping firms. In 1880 the Brisbane Municipal Council acquired the wharf and immediately extended it northward, creating the (now heritage-listed) Petrie Bight retaining wall between the wharf and Queen Street. In 1884 the Council also constructed a wharf at the end of Boundary Street, and in the mid-1880s William Collin established his own wharf at Petrie's Bight, just downstream from the Council's Boundary Street wharf. Purchase of land from the Brisbane Gas Company in 1902 gave the Council control of the river frontage from the Customs House to Boundary Street, and between 1913 and 1916 the Council constructed reinforced concrete wharves between Macrossan and Boundary Streets, and between Kennedy Wharf and the Customs House. The whole of the Council's wharfage at Petrie's Bight was subsequently renamed Circular Quay Wharves.
  Between 1900 and 1912 Brisbane Wharves Ltd established wharves at Petrie's Bight from Boundary Street to Bowen Terrace, rivalling the Council's Circular Quay facilities in importance. Principal investors in the Brisbane Wharf Company were Howard Smith and William Collin and Sons. From the late 1890s, Howard Smith and Company Ltd occupied the Council's Boundary Street Wharf at Petrie's Bight and in the early years of the 20th century leased the adjacent new wharves constructed by Brisbane Wharves Limited at the base of the New Farm cliffs, below Bowen Terrace. These wharves were extended in the 1920s, and in the 1930s were resumed by the Queensland government for the construction of the Story Bridge.
  In the early 20th century the roads to Petrie's Bight were improved significantly by the Brisbane City Council, providing an important impetus for the construction of new warehouses in the Upper Adelaide Street area. From 1923 to 1928 the Brisbane City Council implemented its most ambitious town improvement scheme to that date: the widening of Adelaide Street by 14 feet along its entire length. Resumptions in Adelaide Street had commenced in the 1910s, but work on the street widening did not take place until the 1920s. The work was undertaken in stages, commencing in 1923 at the southern end where the new Brisbane City Hall was under construction. Some buildings had the front section removed and a contemporary facade installed on the new road alignment. Elsewhere, earlier buildings were demolished and substantial new structures took their place. At the northern end of Adelaide Street the cutting down of the hill below St John's Cathedral in 1928 facilitated greater access to Petrie Bight, which, close to new city wharves at the end of Boundary Street, boomed in the 1920s as a warehousing district.
  By 1921 Queensland was poised to resume the economic boom interrupted by the First World War (1914–18). In the period 1922-1928, Queensland experienced its first and last economic boom between the outbreak of war in 1914 and the 1950s. The benefits of the boom economy were reflected throughout the State, but nowhere more so than in Brisbane, with 29% 
caption: Wharves, ~1943
exif: {}