The asylum opened on 13 May 1865, established under Queensland's Benevolent Asylum Wards Act to shelter people unable to care for themselves through illness or infirmity. The first residents arrived by transfer from the benevolent ward of the Brisbane General Hospital, carried across Moreton Bay to Dunwich. Over the decades the institution grew to fill most of the present township: dormitory wards, a kitchen and bakery, a laundry, a public hall and recreation rooms, and from 1926 its own power station. A working farm supplied meat and dairy. It was a self-contained world, built to hold lives that the wider colony had set aside, on an island chosen in part for its very separateness.

It is easy to read the asylum as a place only of endings, and for many it was; the great cemetery makes that plain. But the records also hold gentler things. A photograph from 1909 shows a concert staged in the hall for the elderly residents, an afternoon of music arranged for people the rest of Queensland rarely thought about. There were recreational facilities and a visitor centre for social life. Among those who passed through was the entomologist Alexandre Arsène Girault. The men and women housed here were not statistics waiting to become graves; they were people who had worked and aged and arrived at this island shore, and the institution, for all its institutional coldness, made some room for dignity in their final years.

The asylum could not have run without the Quandamooka people, the Nunukul and Goenpul whose Country this is. Their labour sustained the institution across all eighty years of its life, yet for most of that time they were paid less than others for the same work. The men known as the Aboriginal Gang campaigned to change that, and in 1944, after a struggle lasting some twenty-five years and with the support of the Australian Workers Union, they won award wages, becoming the first Aboriginal workers in Australia to be paid equally. It was a landmark, achieved almost two decades before such recognition reached Aboriginal workers elsewhere in the country. The victory was also bittersweet: the asylum closed soon after, and the men received equal pay for barely eighteen months.

The asylum closed on 30 September 1946, its remaining residents moved to the new Eventide Home at Sandgate on the Brisbane mainland. Most of the buildings were pulled down. A few survive, among them the heritage-listed St Mark's Anglican Church and the Dunwich Public Hall, the latter once the men's mess where thousands took their meals. The cemetery endures, its rows a quiet record of all who ended their days here. The story is kept alive at the North Stradbroke Island Historical Museum and in the Queensland State Archives, where the records of those eighty years are held for the descendants and historians who come looking. On Minjerribah today the Quandamooka people remain the recognised Traditional Owners of an island that has long outlasted the institution it once carried, its sand and its sheltered bay enduring far beyond the buildings raised and razed upon them.