What's in a Name?

Boaters and bureaucrats are at odds over the correct name for one of Australia’s best-known east coast bays.

Along Australia’s east coast is a bay formed by Fraser Island protruding out into the Coral Sea. Its waters stretch across to Bundaberg, then back south into Hervey Bay proper, where whales frolic with their calves each spring.

Nautical charts produced by the Australian Government Hydrographic Office and used by whale watch vessels, visiting sailors, motoryacht cruisers and increasingly by charterers and superyachts, identify this as Hervey Bay. The town on its shores, which became the city of Hervey Bay in 1984, is named after it.

Queensland Government departments, however, have lately begun calling this stretch of water Wide Bay. Queensland Health, for example, says its Fraser Coast-Bundaberg region is Wide Bay, and Queensland State Development has recently issued a map, the South Queensland Superyacht Guide, which likewise lists Hervey Bay as Wide Bay.

Unique whale watching on the bay

Hervey Bay does look like a wide bay, but there any connection with the name ends. The real Wide Bay is over 125km south of Hervey Bay by road, and more like 240km from Bundaberg. It runs from Double Island Point, a well-known feature just north of Noosa used in daily regional weather forecasts, to Inskip Point, where 4WDs are ferried to the southern tip of Fraser Island. 

Rainbow Beach, a small tourist town popular for its multicoloured sands, is in the middle of Wide Bay, and vessels entering the southern end of the Great Sandy Strait near here have to cross the Wide Bay Bar.

The broader geography should be familiar to all Australians. Fraser Island, the world’s largest sand island — also called K’gari (pronounced Gurri) by the local Butchulla people, and meaning ‘paradise’ — is the bit that sticks out very prominently from Australia’s Eastern coastline.

Captain James Cook, surveying this coast in 1770, listed Wide Bay on his subsequent chart, and named dozens of other places in the region, from Cape Byron in NSW to Mount Warning behind Coolangatta, Point Danger, Point Lookout on North Stradbroke Island, Morton Bay (today’s Moreton is a now-accepted misspelling), the Glass House Mountains, Double Island Point, Wide Bay, and then Indian Head and Sandy Cape at the north-east extremity of Fraser Island.

4WDs and lightplanes exploring K'gari

At Sandy Cape, more than two days sail north of Wide Bay in the Endeavour, Cook gazed toward Bundaberg, which is roughly on the same 25 degrees S latitude, and at the vast expanse of water lying in between, and named it Hervey Bay after Lord Augustus John Hervey, Admiral of the Blue, 3rd Earl of Bristol, and Captain Cook’s superior back in Blighty.

Cook incorporated Bristol in the names he gave other geographic features in Alaska, Hawaii and the Cook Islands, in Hervey’s honour, during his later two Pacific passages.

French explorer Jean-François Lapérouse, who was in Botany Bay when the First Fleet arrived in 1788, had already put some of Cook’s notations on his own charts. A subsequent one kept in the Maritime Museum of nearby Noumea in French-run New Caledonia shows Sandy Cape and Baie de Hervey as principal points for navigation on the Queensland Coast.

WHY THE CONFUSION

So how did the two bays get mixed up? There has never been a Wide Bay Regional Council, nor a Queensland State electorate called Wide Bay. There is, however, a Federal electorate of Wide Bay.

A lot of boats call the bay home

It was one of the original 65 electorate names used at Federation in 1901. Wide Bay is on the central coast of this eponymous electorate and was better-known in earlier years because it gave north-bound cargo and passenger ships access, via the Great Sandy Strait, inside Fraser Island, to the once-thriving immigration centre of Maryborough, which was also a goldfields gateway and an important sugarcane town.

Wide Bay was first represented by Andrew Fisher, later a three-time Labor Prime Minister of Australia in the years 1908–1915, leading up to and during World War I. More recently this was the seat of Warren Truss, former Leader of the National Party and Deputy PM, from 1990–2016. Llew O’Brien, a former policeman, is the current MP. 

Before the 2007 election in which Kevin Rudd, the two-time Labor PM from Nambour on the Sunshine Coast, replaced John Howard, Hervey Bay was included in the Federal Wide Bay electorate, which also comprised sparsely-populated Fraser Island, and Maryborough and Gympie in the Mary River Valley.

It’s easy to understand how some Hervey Bay residents and businesses came to think of themselves as being in Wide Bay. They lived in the Federal Wide Bay electorate and had a wide bay literally on their doorsteps. But that year, Hervey Bay, 30km north of Maryborough, was suddenly excluded from the Wide Bay electorate, and Noosa, Cooroy, Tewantin and Peregian Beach on the northern Sunshine Coast were added instead.

It's a boater's dream

Hervey Bay and Bundaberg, two promising regional tigers with faster-developing populations, are now grouped together in the Federal electorate of Hinkler, lapped by the real Hervey Bay.

The general populace was already familiar with Bert Hinkler, the Bundaberg aviation pioneer who made the first solo flight from England to Australia in 1928. Keith Pitt, LNP Minister for Resources, Water and Northern Australia, is the present two-term member.

Surely connections with Wide Bay would start to fade in the 13–14 years that have followed? Not so, it seems. Ties to that name have persisted, aided and abetted by incorrect Queensland Government and regional council maps.

No wonder residents and visitors alike become confused. One State Government ‘regional’ map is called Wide Bay-Burnett, which curiously lumps together the names of a Federal and a very different State electorate. The Federal electorate north of Wide Bay and Hinkler is actually called Flynn, named after John Flynn, founder of the Royal Flying Doctor Service. 

Another grandly titled Wide Bay-Burnett Regional Organisation of Councils (WBBROC) map was accredited by regional councils little more than a decade ago, and oddly it includes burgeoning Hervey Bay and Bundaberg as its geo-centres, but doesn’t refer to either of them.

Heading south on 90km Beach

This ‘Wide Bay’ map encompasses North and South Burnett, Bundaberg, Fraser Coast and Gympie Regional Councils. Not included are Noosa Shire Council and the northern part of Sunshine Coast Regional Council, which since 2007 have been in the Federal electorate of Wide Bay, the only valid present-day use of its south-shifted boundaries.

Federal electorates are in any case named after well-known people or places, not the other way around, as is tried on here.

Fraser Coast Mayor George Seymour, California-born and Brisbane University-educated, perused print versions of Cook’s logs last year — the 250th anniversary of his East Coast passage — looking for some reference to his naming of Wide Bay, but couldn’t find any mention of it, although Hervey Bay’s lineage itself is well-documented.

“Maybe he noted it on the charts that the Endeavour voyage produced,” Seymour concluded. It would certainly be a turnup for the books, in this context, if Wide Bay hadn’t existed at all.

Whatever, it seems that better co-ordination is needed between the oft-overlapping layers of Federal, State and local government authorities, in the interests of many stakeholders, particularly when it comes to map-making.

Hervey Bay is indeed an incredible playground for humpback whales that have calved further north and use these protected waters to get to know their offspring, often staying for a week or more. Fraser Island equally lives up to its reputation as a lost paradise, as its first inhabitants described it, and driving 4WDs along its 90km ocean beach is only one of many interesting activities in this pure-bred dingo sanctuary.

Tourism is now being augmented in Hervey Bay by a gathering of grey nomads whose newly-built villas in spreading estates have custom garages for their RVs, and once-struggling retirees are being replaced by better-heeled ones from the south, people who are downsizing a little and freeing up capital, as they did in Noosa years ago. Wine and jazz festivals may be just around the corner. Seafood expos and impressive vintage car rallies are already well-established. 

The bottom line is that while 50 ‘Wide Bay’ businesses are now listed in the local Hervey Bay phone book, over 200 Hervey Bay companies use that name, including Hervey Bay Airport, Hervey Bay Hospital, Hervey Bay RSL etc, so Cook’s original title remains well in front. It just needs to reassert itself.

A State-Regional Council education campaign, both internal and public, is perhaps needed to overhaul maps and clear up the persistent misnomers. Wide Bay Transit, whose ubiquitous buses ply Hervey Bay’s attractive shoreside esplanade, is one of the companies that could help improve perceptions.