Year: 2010

It was raining heavily this morning, so I decided to postpone my trip out to the old Ferny Grove to Dayboro railway, and instead visit another “place that is no more”.

Harrisons Pocket once was a thriving little farming community almost 10km directly west of Petrie. In this area, the North Pine River twisted around almost three quarters of a circle forming a “pocket”, and Harrisons pocket nestled along the banks of the river at this point.

It had a school, formerly known as Harrisons Pocket Provisional School, then State School, and a Post and Telegraph Office.

You didn’t really drive through, because it was located in a natural cul-de-sac in the river. The way out was over a shallow part of the river about 3km south east, called “Gordon’s Crossing”. This was one of the earliest crossings of the North Pine River, predating Youngs Crossing by at least twenty years. Incidentally, if you’ve ever been on Gordons Crossing Road, now you know what it’s named after.

Sadly, these places are now inundated by the North Pine dam. You can get pretty close by riding through some scrubby bushland along some fire roads, which is what Harrison and I did today in the pouring rain. (I think he was curious about a place that shared the same name as him).

He found the ride very difficult, especially on some of the muddy tracks. To his credit, he persevered and we made it back home safely.

In the map below you can see the original course (in blue) of the North Pine River before it was dammed. The red track is the path that Harrison and I took. You can click on some of the markers on the map to see the location of the post office, the school and Gordon’s Crossing.

There’s a large dam in our area (The North Pine Dam) which was built in the 1970’s. It has created a lake (Lake Samsonvale) which has flooded a lot of old historical places, including roads, bridges, homesteads, farms and townships.

About a year ago Steve and I visited this area on foot.

My ride today covered a lot of the shoreline of the lake, and I was pleasantly surprised by some of the remnants I found.

One interesting road is Samsonvale Road. As you can see from this map large parts of it are now under several metres of water, but portions of it rise out of the water like a sleepy sea-serpent.

Those above-water portions are hidden away in bushland – unused and overgrown.

These photos are of a road cut-away – where engineers have dug away a hill to smooth the course of the road to reduce its gradient. The only problem these days, apart from the overgrowth, is that if you walk along the road for a hundred metres in either direction you end up in the water.

In a way it’s eerie. Old fence posts and pieces of barbed wire mark old boundaries that are meaningless today.

Strange looking exotic / domestic plants such as umbrella trees spring up in unexpected places – a quaint reminder that this once was a garden, not overgrown bushland.

Who knows? Perhaps one day a few hundred years in the future someone will cut through the overgrowth on our street and find old fence posts, gardens and tracks that once meant something to us.