The Walrus had a colourful life before it ran aground. Built at Cleveland in 1864 as a sailing vessel, it was sold in 1869 to James Stewart, who converted it to steam and fitted it with a still. Stewart - known as 'The Bosun' - ran it as a floating sugar mill up and down the Albert and Logan Rivers, crushing cane for the scattered plantations. He soon found a more profitable use for his surplus molasses: distilling rum on the sly. The Inspector of Distilleries granted the boat a floating-distillery licence in 1869, though he plainly disapproved, deeming the vessel unsuitable. The licence lapsed in 1872 when the Walrus stopped carrying crushing equipment and worked only as a still. It is said to have kept distilling illegally for years afterward, until it finally came to rest on Gooding's riverbank and gave up its copper heart.

The Logan district grew some of Queensland's earliest sugar. Gooding and Davy, brothers-in-law who had sailed from Devon in 1862, planted cane between the Albert and Logan Rivers in 1865 and named their plantation 'Beenleigh' after home. The township that grew up nearby took the name from them. But the river flats that made transport easy also made disaster routine. In 1887 a flood swept the entire Davy and Gooding distillery - rum stocks and all - down the river. They rebuilt with another still and carried on. Floods returned again and again across the decades, the most recent in 2017, when the remnants of Cyclone Debbie breached the main building and halted production for six months. The distillery has been washed out, rebuilt, and washed out again - and each time it has come back to the same riverbank.

By the 1890s, when many smaller plantations were failing to frost, disease, and recession, Beenleigh thrived. A brick spirit store went up in 1890, built in two stages of English-bond brickwork that still stands as the oldest fabric on the site. In 1899 Beenleigh rum took a gold medal at the London International Fair, and the brand was soon selling as far north as Cairns. New owners over the years reshaped the place - Thomas Brown and Sons installed great kauri-pine vats in 1917, and later owners added column stills, modern fermentation tanks, and steel walkways. The still house was painted the bright red it wears today. Through all of it, the old copper pot still stayed, prized precisely because pot distillation keeps the heavy, flavourful elements that give dark rum its character.

Beenleigh's red still house rises from the flat river country and can be seen from the Pacific Highway and from the Albert itself - a landmark on land that is otherwise low and open. Inside, the contrast tells the story: gleaming modern columns and tanks alongside a copper still that predates Federation. The Queensland Heritage Register, which listed the distillery in 2004, called it a rare survivor of the early sugar industry of the south-east, and singled out that 19th-century still as likely the earliest of its type in the state. For the people of the district, the place is something more personal - a focus of memory for the families who worked there across generations, and proof that a derelict steamboat, beached at the right moment, could become an Australian institution.