Story Bridge Brisbane: 75th anniversary of the Story Bridge - Brisbane - QLD - Australia - News Article Locations on Waymarking.com

YESTERDAY Brisbane residents were not happy at the Story Bridge’s 75th anniversary party - and things were no different when the bridge was first opened in 1940.

LOOK at them. Look at their faces. It is the mid-to-late 1930s in Depression-era Brisbane, and you can see people down by the docks at Petrie Bight on the river, or gathering by a railing high up on Bowen Terrace towards New Farm, or gawking from the window of workers’ cottages in Kangaroo Point, dumbstruck, in awe at the steel and concrete behemoth rising and stretching before them like some great promise.
After years of frailty in this town of wood and tin, the city populace has, at last, something solid, something monumental, to anchor themselves to. A bridge. A huge, hulking bridge that will stand solid, stolid, implacable, in good times or bad.
Look at it, this frill of 12,000 tonnes of grey steel, a masterpiece of precision, the largest span metal truss bridge in Australia. San Francisco had its bridge. So did Sydney.
But this. Queensland-designed, built of Queensland materials using Queensland ingenuity.
Built by Queenslanders for Queenslanders. In its day, the eighth-longest cantilever bridge in the world.
At the start they called it the Jubilee Bridge, in honour of their king on the other side of the world. Then they dubbed it the Kangaroo Point Bridge, a dreary, utilitarian moniker given it joined the point in the south to Petrie Bight in the north. As the bridge’s concrete decks inched closer to their kiss in the middle, it became the Story Bridge, in honour of a hardworking local public servant.
Already, you could see this bridge as something greater than the sum of its parts. Over five years it steadily entered our skyline. The first sod was turned, marking the beginning of construction, in 1935, with the city and state at their lowest economic ebb, and the bridge was officially opened just months after Australia joined Britain in the war on Germany and entered World War II, in 1940. This bridge, this bracket of hard times, said something more. It proved we could create great things when we were most vulnerable. It said: this bridge is who we are — tough, immovable, impervious. It literally bound the two halves of Brisbane city.
And who knew, perhaps it was a carriageway, as bridges have forever been in mythology, that took us from a bleak present to a brighter future. The bridge. It rose and dropped at both ends, like the hilly inner precincts of the city itself, but writ in steel. Its riveted spans were a tableau of large and small capital Ks, straight up and reversed. K after K, inside and out. Did they mean anything, all these Ks? Kin? Kindness? Killer? King? Knowledge? Or were these special Ks simply integral to the silent alphabet of engineering and physics?
For generations, the Story Bridge framed the CBD and its backdrop of Mount Coot-tha and the Taylor Range in the west. Today, it is dwarfed by the very thing it once set out to enhance, a lovely piece of old-fashioned crochet strung between towers of mirrored skyscrapers, the mountains and ranges in the distance a broken horizon. We traverse this bridge, back and forth, without a thought for its complex design and the enormous will, and in some instances, suffering, it took to create it. It once stood alone as a feat of human imagination. Today, it is just a convenient means to get from one side of the river to the other. In the shadows beneath its northern end, the relentless passage of vehicle tyres above issues peculiar thuds and hisses, like waves dumping heavily on a shoreline.
If you cross it as a pedestrian, the wind whipping cold about its girders, it is impossible not to sense a hint of desolation, suspended over the winter river, the small but profound signage offered to those who might contemplate using the bridge for something for which it was not specifically designed. “There is hope. There is help. Call Lifeline.” And: “Who cares about you? We do. Call Lifeline.”
Yet in death, as they say, there is life: cyclists, joggers, walkers, people heading to work, tourists taking photographs, pedestrians in suits making their daily pilgrimage to work. There is a measured thrill in looking across, from this perch, to the Brisbane metropolis through the patterns made by the steel Ks, catching a ferry gliding beneath, observing the bridge’s distended shadow play on the surface of Brisbane River, competing with the silvery reflected sunlight thrown down by the office blocks. But it’s a mixed delight. It is eerie at the bridge’s highest point, and the steel railing cold to the touch.
Is she beautiful? It was designed by the same man who had a hand in the making of Sydney Harbour Bridge. That southern miracle, though, rises in a hopeful arch between its two pylons. The Story is virtually its exact opposite — a downward hang between two high points. Was it intentional, that Sydney should get the uplifting crescent, and Brisbane the bowl of the underdog? Were we left with the only other idea Sandgate-born engineer John Jacob (J.J.) Crew Bradfield possessed in that high and highly intelligent forehead of his? The up and the down? Two sides of one notion?
Bradfield himself waxed lyrical about his Brisbane creation: “A cantilever bridge with a curved top chord constructed of plates and angles, its bold towers and broad shoulders linking the shore and river arms, whether viewed nearby or afar off, express simplicity, strength, grace.”
Broad, strong shoulders? The downturned bowl? We may never know the intention behind Bradfield’s vision. The men who made the Story Bridge are long gone, intentions evaporated, symbolism lost to time. Things change down the years, and the human tales that surround our endeavours often peel away, or take on a different meaning. So it is with the Story Bridge.
It was named after John Douglas (J.D.) Story, Scottish-born and a child of eight years when his family arrived in Brisbane. In 1885, he took a job as a junior clerk with the then director of education, and rose through the ranks to public service commissioner.
His influence, particularly in education reform, was immense. He died in 1966, almost half a century ago. But who of the city’s younger generations know John Douglas Story was the man behind the name of the bridge? Which tourists, focusing their cameras on its span, have a clue about the man known to his employees as “J.D.” who lived by the maxim, “More work, less argument”? What is left of our bridge when the context of J.D. Story disappears, just as the sun sometimes burns off fog tangled in its K-shaped girders?
Might those who delight in this old lady — officially opened 75 years ago on Monday — historically ignorant foreigners and locals alike marvel that here is a city so confident in its sense of self that it might name a major bridge after one of the oldest human needs of all, the need to tell a story? Is that what it is now? Everyone and everything, even a bridge, has a story.
TALK OF ANOTHER MAJOR RIVER CROSSING — in addition to the Victoria and the Grey Street bridges — for Brisbane city reached its zenith in 1925, when mayor alderman William Jolly appointed a formal commission to look into the issue. The Cross River Commission was tasked with locating the best site for a potential new bridge, ascertaining its cost, and canvassing business, public institutions and the public for feedback. They set up an office on the ground floor of town hall.
By October 1925, rumours were strong that the most likely site would stretch from Main St, Kangaroo Point, to the top of the cliffs above Petrie Bight, adjoining Bowen Tce. Mayor Jolly was coy with the press, refusing to confirm the commission’s recommendation.
It wasn’t until December 1933 that the city’s dream of a new, landmark bridge inched towards reality. A board to supervise the construction of the bridge was formed. And J.J. Bradfield, to be the supervising engineer of the bridge, was revising his final designs. It was an important project. Local people needed work. And they needed hope.
In June 1934, the Queensland Cabinet approved the Bridge Board’s report on the construction of the bridge, and agreed to begin preliminary work on the river banks.
By July of that year, the bridge was a , with the government releasing specific details of the structure that “will rank among the notable bridges of the world”. According to the board’s report, the bridge would be “of cantilever type, with a channel span of 924 feet [281.6m] … 100 feet [30.5m] above high-water level and 60 feet [18.3m] wide between trusses … ”
The tender was awarded to two Queensland companies, Evans Deakin and Hornibrook Constructions. Premier William Forgan Smith trumpeted: “Direct employment on the bridge is likely to be found for at least 600 men for the four years of construction, and at least 1000 men inclusive of those employed indirectly in Queensland on materials, transport and incidentals.” The projected cost was £1,154,000.
On Friday, May 24, 1935, the Queensland premier turned the first sod on the bridge’s construction. “This giant span will kindle in the hearts and minds of the people pride in an achievement which begins today,” Forgan Smith declared. Bradfield, the bridge’s designer, also spoke at the event.
Meanwhile, the construction companies reached out to Canadian engineer LeRoy Zimmerman Wilson for his expertise. He had been the president of the Dominion Bridge Company in Quebec, Canada. He was to be the chief steel engineer on the Brisbane bridge.
Wilson’s great-grandson, Brisbane novelist and barrister Simon Cleary, said the family resettled in the Queensland capital for the duration of construction. One of the Wilson daughters later married, and called Brisbane home.
“He had completed the Jacques Cartier Bridge in Montreal,” Cleary says. “It too is a cantilever bridge made of steel. You look at it and think — that’s the Story Bridge. A lot of people from Brisbane who go to Montreal … they see the Jacques Cartier Bridge [opened to traffic in 1930] at certain angles [and the likeness is] uncanny; it’s a little bit disconcerting.”
By early 1937, a name for the local bridge had finally been settled. It would honour the work of J.D. Story, public servant. “It is indeed a worthy distinction to have one’s name associated with a dignified work which in ordinary course will serve the public in a useful way through the ages,” a humbled Story said.
Despite some union agitation for increased pay for “height and hazardous work”, and a cost blowout to £1.6 million, the construction proceeded smoothly. All the steelwork, approximately 12,000 tonnes, was fabricated at the Rocklea workshop of Evans Deakin. The concrete work and erection of the superstructure was carried out on site by the M.R. Hornibrook organisation.
Only four lives were lost during the building of the Story Bridge, a statistic considered a triumph for such a complicated infrastructure project. The first was in November 1937, when Hans James Zimmermann, 46, of Cleveland, slipped while putting steel into position and fell 23m to the ground. The last was in late 1939, just months from the bridge’s completion; Arthur Mackay Wharton, 24, of Ipswich, was heating rivets with mate Herman Kleemeyer, high above the river, when he dropped some equipment on his knee, then staggered back and over the edge. Kleemeyer would later tell the coroner: “I happened to look up as he was going to sit down and he seemed a bit pale in the face. He got halfway to his original position he was sitting in, and he threw his arms up and went backwards, and fell off the bridge. He fell backwards into space.”
The Story Bridge was officially opened on Saturday, July 6, 1940, by the governor, Sir Leslie Wilson, before premier Forgan Smith, church leaders, federal and state MPs and other distinguished guests. The governor reminded the guests that the Story was “not only a bridge … it has brought to Queenslanders the knowledge that in their midst are the workmen, the material, initiative and determination to accomplish whatever they set out to do”.
Not everything went to plan at the opening. Brisbane was still a small town, a place where toes could easily be trodden on and egos miffed. “There was all the controversy over who was invited to the opening,” says Cleary, who fictionalised the construction of the bridge in his acclaimed novel, The Comfort of Figs. “My great-grandfather wasn’t invited because he was Canadian, and the story that the government at the time wanted to tell was that it was a bridge built by Queenslanders. So that didn’t quite fit that line. God wasn’t mentioned, either. The bridge wasn’t blessed by God.”
Indeed, Brisbane’s Catholic (Sir James Duhig) and Anglican (John Wand) archbishops both took leave of the ceremony, held on the bridge itself, before it was formally over. They had been slotted in the visitors’ enclosure in the sun, as opposed to the official enclosure, which had a roof.
More than 60,000 people walked across the bridge that Saturday. “It was the era, internationally, of bridge-building,” Cleary reflects. “I think that if you had a big, notable bridge, it was a sign of a sophisticated city, of a metropolitan city.”
The next day, and open to traffic, toll collectors were dealing with 20 cars per minute in both directions. Brisbane had arrived.
IS SHE BEAUTIFUL? “Some people say that the cantilever bridge is two shoulders, and what you’re looking at is the strength, the muscularity of the Story Bridge, whereas what one looks at with the Sydney Harbour Bridge is a rainbow,” says Simon Cleary.
“I don’t know whether you describe it as a beautiful bridge or not. I don’t know. On some bridges, people fasten locks as a symbol of love. There are some on Kurilpa Bridge. I don’t think there are any on the Story Bridge.”
We like to tell stories about what is before us, adds Cleary. “But the stories aren’t always stories of glory and celebration, because bridges the world over have been used as points of suicide. It’s a pretty loud bridge. The traffic is really close. And those expansion joints are fascinating. Those metal teeth embedded in the bitumen that open and close … ”
To her people, she is as recognisable as the faces of their own mothers. A picture of her might be glimpsed by an expatriate, across the world, and evince a homesick tear.
She is as part and parcel of Brisbane life as the City Hall clock tower, the river, the Moreton Bay figs, the tin and wood houses on stumps, the green rage of the sky before a summer storm.
Brisbane is barely imaginable without her.
She’s beautiful, because she’s ours.

Matthew Condon, The Courier-Mail
July 5, 2015 4:00pm
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Type of publication: Newspaper When was the article reported?: 07/05/2015 Publication: The Courir Mail Article Url: [Web Link] Is Registration Required?: no How widespread was the article reported?: regional News Category: Arts/Culture

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