There’s an emotive scene in Trent Dalton’s novel Boy Swallows Universe in which young protagonist Eli Bell is perched atop an old bridge, battling to reel in a fish, when his serial prison-escaper friend, “Slim” Halliday, dies on its warped wooden planks.
That rickety structure, the Hornibrook Bridge, long stood as a testament to the gulf between a metropolis and the sleepy communities to its north. To locals, it was known as the “humpity bump”.
The few remnants of the bridge now lie in the shadows of two more modern structures that link Brisbane’s northern bayside suburbs to the Redcliffe peninsula.
Like the commuters whizzing over Bramble Bay on the decidedly less romantic Ted Smout Memorial Bridge, this is a region going forward in a hurry. The smattering of sleepy bayside towns full of retirees and rural hinterland villages have been quietly growing and maturing.
The Moreton Bay region is now home to almost half a million people. It’s one of the fastest growing regions in the country, projected to accommodate at least 200,000 more people over the next two decades as young families flock to the region in search of affordable homes with access to the bush and the beach.
And it’s now preparing to announce itself on the national stage.
‘A new era’
Australia’s newest top tier rugby league side is seeking to stamp its authority on the NRL. But the league’s new kids will seek to evoke the emotion of their own storied past when the Redcliffe-born Dolphins enter the top flight for the first time this season.
The man tasked with growing grassroots support for the team, Shane Morris, says the 75-year story of the Redcliffe Dolphins will help the new franchise win hearts and minds.
“We are creating a new history, a new era,” Morris says. “But it is building off what’s happened in the past. That history is really important.”
The Dolphins’ new era will begin on the first Sunday of March against the Roosters, in a nod to the greatest character in its history book: Arthur Beetson.
Beetson burst on to the scene aged 20 by steering Redcliffe to its first Brisbane rugby league title in 1965. “Big Artie” would go on to captain the Eastern Suburbs Roosters to two premierships in a career that saw him crowned one of the game’s 13 immortals.
But the Dolphins’ clash with the Roosters is symbolic for another reason – one that has rugby league purists gnashing their teeth in frustration. Just as their inaugural opponents ditched the name of the community from which they arose in favour of the sweepingly unspecific Sydney label, so too have the NRL’s new arrivals.
Only they’ve dropped geography entirely and will simply play under their nickname, the Dolphins.
“That really gets my goat going,” says Roger Waite, author of tomes including The Glory Days of the Brisbane Rugby League (1977 to 1987).
“The nickname is basically the team. Location is the community. So what they’ve done, by not having a location, is they’ve essentially divorced themselves from the community.”
But the Dolphins believe they are fulfilling a mandate NRL boss Andrew Abdo charged them with when he awarded them the competition’s 17th licence and a remit to “own” an area beyond Brisbane ambiguously titled “the northern corridor”.
To Morris, that corridor runs up 500km north to central highlands behind Rockhampton, a swathe of country where he has spent 18 months visiting schools and clubs in an effort to give the Dolphins “a point of difference”.
“This is making sure that we’re visible in the community,” Morris says. “That we’re approachable.”
But approachable to whom?
Creating identity
The man who governs much of what will be the franchise’s heartland, Moreton Bay mayor Peter Flannery, admits his region is not one to enjoy much brand recognition.
“It’s the area that people usually drive through to get to the Sunshine Coast,” he says.
Nor did the area’s boundaries emerge organically – Flannery describes the 2008 amalgamation of three historic councils, including Redcliffe, into one local government area sprawling over more than 2,000 square kilometres, as “a bit of a forced marriage”.
“But that’s the path we’re on,” he says. “And part of my job as mayor is to bring the region together from being three separate areas to one large family.”
To that end, Flannery’s council have backed the Redcliffe rugby league club’s ascension for years, and the mayor admits he is disappointed the franchise didn’t rebrand itself the Moreton Bay Dolphins.
Because he knows if he wants to put his region on the map, to help create a place where people work, play and socialise and not just seek an affordable home with a back yard, then Moreton Bay needs a good story.
“It’s about creating identity,” Flannery says.
Associate professor in human geography at the University of Queensland, Elin Charles-Edwards, describes such identity construction as a “really potent thing”.
She says Moreton Bay has traditionally been a “liminal space” whose sense of identity was confined to its hinterland villages and “old coastal resort towns where Brisbanites used to holiday in decades past” on the east.
But with the rapid emergence of “really large settlements” like North Lakes and more to come in the form of Caboolture West, it was a region not only building new homes, but an emerging sense of place.
“A place is not just a geographical location,” she says. “It is something that we imagine and we associate all sorts of feelings and pride – and a sports team is really good at fostering all those positive emotions.”
The home team
Among those already bursting with pride at their “local team” is a scribe of state league footy and Burpengary Jets masters player, Matt Crowhurst.
A timber cutting town turned truck stop on the Bruce Highway, Burpengary, is now a booming suburb of about 16,500 people and a roughly 30-minute drive from Dolphins Oval.
“It’s your very typical, middle class, working, quintessential Australian community,” Crowhurst says. “A lot of quarter acre blocks, a lot of young families moving in and setting up their lives. Also a lot of retirees who have lived here for a long time and are putting up their feet. Not a lot at either end of the spectrum.”
Originally from the bottom end of rugby union mad New Zealand, Crowhurst fell in love with league from the first match he ever saw: the 1989 Balmain v Canberra grand final and grew up on a diet of VHS recorded matches from across the Tasman.
The Energy Queensland faults officer made the sunshine state his home in 2008 and passionately embraced the game at a grassroots level – but Crowhurst says he has “never really had a dyed-in-the-wool NRL team”. That changed in an instant in October 2021 when Abdo announced the Dolphins as the winning NRL bid.
“My family are already ticketed Dolphins members, so we are onboard that train 110%,” he says.
“My wife, my daughter, my in-laws, we’ve gone out and spent a bit of money and got jerseys and hats and scarves and all the shenanigans you get. It’s exciting. I’ve never had a team that I can feel like this about. That this is my team.”
On 11 March, when the Dolphins finally play their first NRL home game at Redcliffe, Crowhurst will be in the stands cheering, like so many who have crossed the bridge from Brisbane.
