Long before any reserve, this coast belonged to the Djiru, a Dyirbal-speaking people kin to the Girramay, Gulngay, and other groups of the Tully and Murray river country. They had lived here for countless generations, reading the rainforest and the reef, when the first European navigators charted the islands offshore and bêche-de-mer fishing boats began working the waters. White settlers reached the beaches in 1882; timber-cutters camped here, sometimes trading tobacco or tools for Aboriginal labour. By the time the settlement opened, the disruption was already severe — disease, displacement, and violence had thinned the Djiru population, and many who survived had moved away. Perhaps a fifth of the original people remained in their own country.

The settlement opened in 1914 under Superintendent John Martin Kenny, a former Native Police officer, and at its height held up to four hundred residents. The word the government used was "protection," but the reserve was also a tool of discipline and removal: Aboriginal people from the surrounding districts were brought here whether they wished to come or not, their movements and their lives placed under the control of a single white official. It was one node in a vast system that, across Australia, separated families, suppressed languages, and treated sovereign peoples as wards of the state. The humpies of the Djiru still stood along the shore, but the authority over this coast no longer lay with the people who belonged to it.

The storm that struck on 10 March 1918 was one of the deadliest in Australian history. Near Innisfail to the north, winds may have exceeded 240 kilometres an hour. The eye passed close to the settlement late that evening, and a storm surge — by some accounts nearly four metres high — swept across the low coast, dragging people out to sea. Superintendent Kenny and his daughter were among those killed by flying debris; so were many Aboriginal residents whose names the sketchy records never preserved. Across the wider district the cyclone killed dozens — thirty-seven in Innisfail alone, with estimates for the whole region running past a hundred. A rescue ship, the *Innisfail*, battled north from Townsville through swollen rivers and shattered forest to reach the dead and the injured. The survivors who remained at the settlement salvaged what food they could from the wreckage.

The cyclone did not scatter the survivors so much as deliver them into a harder confinement. A government inspector recommended a new reserve on Great Palm Island, sixty kilometres out from Townsville, and from June 1918 the Hull River people were taken there — along with others rounded up by police in the bush around Tully and Cardwell. Palm Island would become one of the most notorious reserves in the country, a place used to punish and isolate Aboriginal people from across Queensland. For the Djiru, it meant the sea between themselves and home. The settlement site was abandoned; white settlers surveyed a town here in 1939, calling it Kenny before it became South Mission Beach in 1963. A century after the storm, on 10 March 2018, the Mija Memorial was unveiled to honour those who died — and to keep their story from being washed away with the rest.