On 17 July 1799, the explorer Matthew Flinders landed here from the sloop Norfolk at half past ten in the morning and named the spot Red Cliff Point for the rust-coloured cliffs facing the bay. A quarter-century later, in 1824, the colonial authorities chose this shore for a new penal settlement, the first European foothold in what would become Queensland. It did not last. By May 1825 the outpost was abandoned and moved south to the banks of the Brisbane River, the site of the city today. The site proved poorly chosen: the water supply was inadequate, the ground swarmed with mosquitoes, there was no safe anchorage, and the Ningy Ningy people resisted the seizure of their land. The convicts and soldiers left behind a scatter of empty huts, and a name that would outlive them all.

This is Ningy Ningy and Turrbal country, and it was Aboriginal people who named what the Europeans left behind. Looking at the deserted settlement, they called the empty buildings 'oompie bong', from words meaning shelter and gone, vanished, dead. Anglicised over time to Humpybong, the name came to mean, in effect, 'the dead houses', and it stuck to the whole peninsula. There is a quiet irony in it: the newcomers arrived to settle and failed, and it was the original inhabitants who supplied the lasting word for their absence. Locals still use the name Humpybong today, in school names and street signs, a small linguistic monument to a colony that could not hold.

The Gibb family arrived from England in August 1958 and settled at Redcliffe. The boys sang to make pocket money, and a speedway promoter named Bill Goode put them to work entertaining the crowd between races, often from a moving truck circling the track. The group's name has a tidy local origin: it came from the shared initials of Barry Gibb, Bill Goode, and a Brisbane radio announcer named Bill Gates, the 'B.G.s' becoming the Bee Gees. The town has not forgotten. In 2013 the council opened Bee Gees Way, a walkway in the Redcliffe centre lined with photographs and music, anchored by a statue of the brothers as the young teenagers they were when this windy peninsula first heard them harmonise.

For most of its life Redcliffe was an island in all but name, reachable from Brisbane only the long way around until 1935, when the Hornibrook Bridge first strode across Bramble Bay. Better bridges followed, and in 2010 the Ted Smout Memorial Bridge opened at 2.7 kilometres, among the longest in Australia, named for Queensland's longest-surviving First World War veteran. The peninsula wears its 22 kilometres of coastline lightly: jetties, sheltered swimming beaches, the rusting wreck of the gunboat Gayundah on the rocks at Woody Point. On most weekends skydivers drift down onto Suttons Beach from a Cessna circling overhead, and each May the sky fills with colour for Kitefest. For its modest size, Redcliffe has produced a startling roll of Olympic swimmers and rugby league stars, but it is still those three boys on the speedway truck the world remembers first.