For a place ringed entirely by water, Woodford Island is oddly easy to reach. Two bridges and a ferry stitch it to the mainland. At the southern tip, the Wingfield Bridge crosses from Brushgrove to Cowper; at the northern end, the McFarlane Bridge carries you into Maclean, its name honouring John McFarlane, a local member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly. On the western side, an old cable ferry still hauls cars across to Woodford Dale. Tourist Drive 22 runs the length of the island between the Lawrence car ferry and the McFarlane Bridge, threading past cane paddocks, a pioneer cemetery, and the slow brown river that is the whole reason any of this exists.

Woodford Island was among the first places Europeans settled on the Far North Coast, and the reason was timber. The settler John Small arrived drawn by stands of Australian red cedar, the so-called red gold that pulled cutters up every navigable river in the colony. The original inhabitants were Bundjalung people, and the cedar rush brought catastrophe. In 1838, some twenty Bundjalung people were murdered here by cedar-getters in a reprisal killing, one of the many frontier massacres that scarred the Northern Rivers as the timber economy advanced. The island's Aboriginal heritage has not vanished: the village of Ilarwill on the island remains a place of real significance, a reminder that this country had owners long before it had a name on a colonial map.

It is hard to picture now, but Brushgrove at the island's southern end was once a roaring river port. Sitting on the Clarence with steamers calling at its wharves, the town shipped out timber, sugar and produce, and the wealth that flowed back built schools, shops, a police station, a pub and all the apparatus of a place that expected to grow. Then the roads came, and the railways, and the river trade that had made Brushgrove suddenly made no sense at all. Over the past century the town has quietly shrunk. The last school on the island, at Woodford Dale, closed its doors in 2011. What remains is the architecture of an earlier confidence, scattered among the cane.

Run a line through the island's near-exact centre and you strike a mountain ridge, an unexpected spine of high ground in a landscape that is otherwise pure floodplain. It gives Woodford Island both the largest area and the highest point of any island in the Clarence. Everything else lies low, and everything low floods; the Clarence has drowned these flats many times over, and the threat of high water shapes how people live here. The economy reflects the geography: sugar cane in the wet paddocks, dairy cattle on the pasture, a small fishing fleet working the river, and most residents driving off-island to Maclean or Grafton for anything more than the basics. In 1999 the Woodford Island Nature Reserve was proclaimed to protect the higher, drier forest along the ridge, sheltering rare eucalypts and threatened wildlife on the one part of the island the water cannot reach.