A small roadside sign on Ensbey Road, Flaxton, has quietly returned after disappearing for close to a year.
The replacement, installed by Sunshine Coast Council, restores an Australia Remembers 1945-1995 marker commemorating the presence of Australian Army engineers during World War II.
“The sign commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the End of World War II, located on Ensbey Road in Flaxton, was 31 years old and in need of renewal,” a Council representative said. “The replacement of this sign was prompted by a request from a community member.”
Chasing down why that particular sign exists, and whether it can still be trusted, has turned up a chapter of Blackall Range history that has largely slipped from memory: a paper trail running from a retired soldier’s handwritten notes to handwritten army diaries held at the Australian War Memorial.
More Than a Roadside Sign
The Ensbey Road marker records that the site was occupied by Section 3 of the 4th Field Company, Royal Australian Engineers, and was originally sited at the junction of Ensbey Road and the Mapleton-Montville Road. A near-identical sign at the corner of Delicia Road and Azalea Street in Mapleton commemorates the 2/7th Australian Cavalry Regiment, roughly 500 metres along Delicia Road at what was then the site of a Forestry Department building.
Council said the signs were funded by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs and installed in partnership with local RSLs, historical societies and community groups, part of a national program marking the war’s 50th anniversary. Because the signs were commissioned before council amalgamation, no installation records survive locally. Council has since identified seven further signs from the same 1995 program elsewhere on the coast, at Coolum, Alexandra Headland, Nambour, Buderim, Yandina, Palmwoods and Kings Beach, suggesting the commemorative project reached well beyond the Blackall Range.
Who Told The Story
Both Blackall Range signs turn out to have a documented author, in a manner of speaking. Historian Brian Rough, whose research into the Sunshine Coast’s wartime history has featured throughout this story, uncovered files at the Heritage Library in Nambour compiled by Fred Fink, a Yandina veteran and RSL member who had served with the 2/4th Field Company. Fink appears to have gathered the material behind the former Maroochy Shire’s Australia Remembers signs from named local informants: a Mr D.H. Crerar of Buderim, a veteran of the same engineer corps, provided the account behind the Ensbey Road sign, while a Mr J.L. Howes of Nambour supplied the information for Delicia Road. A letter from then-Maroochy Shire councillor Bob King to Fink, dated 1 August 1996, points to the two working together on the wider signage project, though Fink’s own planned history of the shire’s wartime camps was never published.
“There was no deep dive into war diaries or other archival material, all of which would have been difficult for most folk at that time, so oral history was heavily relied upon,” Brian said. “Sometimes our memories are fallible, and not all signage is accurate, though these two seem to be fine.”
What The War Diaries Show
To test that judgement, Range Community News examined the original war diaries of the 4th Field Company, Royal Australian Engineers, held by the Australian War Memorial. The company was raised at Bonegilla, Victoria, in December 1941, roughly 260 strong, and formed part of the 3rd Infantry Division. Its diaries for September and October 1942 were lost during or after the war, so the surviving record begins in December, when the company was based at Palmwoods and its sections dispersed to work on roads carrying heavy military traffic.
An entry from 17 December 1942 lists roadworks on the Mapleton-Montville-Maleny route among six projects then underway. Diary entries through early January 1943 place 2 and 3 Sections on that same route almost daily, though without ever naming a precise site within it. The Department of Veterans’ Affairs, which reviewed the same diaries, concludes that 3 Section was most likely allocated the Mapleton-Montville sector on the reasoning that Flaxton sits midway between the two, and that the sign’s original placement probably reflected local and veteran memory rather than a documented camp location. The work shifted in mid-January to Cooroy Road and the Mapleton-Nambour road, and the sections returned to Palmwoods on 22 January.
That is a lot of road maintenance for five weeks’ work, and the state of the road itself may explain why. According to local accounts, the Mapleton-Montville route through Flaxton remained an unsealed gravel road until the early 1970s. A gravel surface carrying heavy, tracked military vehicles day after day would have needed far more constant repair than a sealed one, which fits the diary’s recurring complaints about a shortage of tip trucks holding up the work.
The Delicia Road sign rests on similar ground. Department research, drawing on the regiment’s own war diary, found that B Squadron of the 2/7th Cavalry Regiment moved to Mapleton on 17 June 1942 for dismounted reconnaissance, while A Squadron worked out of Caboolture and C Squadron out of Kilcoy, before B Squadron rejoined the regiment at Landsborough on 8 August 1942. The sign credits the whole regiment, though the evidence points specifically to its B Squadron. Brian, who has cross-checked the squadron’s own location statements from that period, said it appears to have shifted camp at least four times while in the area, more consistent with a small, mobile unit pitching tents as it went than a fixed post. Their job, he said, was less about standing patrols than sketching country the wider force might need to fall back through if a Japanese landing occurred.
None of that amounts to a discrete, documented camp at either Ensbey Road or Delicia Road, and neither the war diaries nor Council’s records claim one. What the diaries do confirm is that engineers from Palmwoods spent weeks working the Flaxton stretch of the Mapleton-Montville road, and that a squadron based at Landsborough spent almost two months moving through country around Mapleton. That does not make the signs wrong. It sharpens what they are recording. Palmwoods, Landsborough and Nambour, the district’s administrative and rail hub, all appear on a list of confirmed Sunshine Coast camp locations Brian compiled from wartime records, and it was from those hubs, not from Flaxton or Mapleton themselves, that the units working the Range were sent out.
Preparing For An Uncertain Future
These local postings formed part of a far larger military presence across South East Queensland. After Japan entered the war in December 1941, Australia faced a real prospect of invasion, and thousands of experienced troops returning from the Middle East were deployed across the Sunshine Coast as planners strengthened coastal defences and inland transport routes.
Brian’s research, produced during his 2022-23 appointment as Sunshine Coast Council’s Historian in Residence, describes the Blackall Range as strategically significant because it overlooked transport corridors linking the coast to inland Queensland, including the road network the engineers were repairing. Against that backdrop, the road works around Flaxton and the reconnaissance patrols from Mapleton were part of Australia’s wartime preparations at a time when invasion still seemed possible.
Preserving Local History
Council said none of the surviving signs are listed on the Local Heritage Register, as there is no physical evidence such as historic buildings attached to the sites. Brian noted that other units passed through both districts during the war and have since faded from living memory entirely, with no sign left to mark them at all.
“Acknowledgement that they were there even for such a short period can still tell its own story,” he said.
For now, on Ensbey Road at least, that acknowledgement stands again. The Ensbey Road sign, replaced after a member of the community asked Council to act, points to something the records bear out: engineers and cavalry genuinely worked and patrolled this stretch of the Range at a time when invasion seemed possible. Exactly where their tents stood may never be pinned down, but the story the sign tells is not in doubt.
Sunshine Coast Regional Council Historian in Residence
Brian Rough – Living Through World War II on the Sunshine Coast
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