WWII Radio Receiving Station
Toward the centre of Birkdale Community Precinct is a former top-secret US Army base that was so significant to Australia during World War II, it has been entered into the Queensland Heritage Register.
In 1942 the Australian Government asserted possession over a large portion of what was then known as Cottons Farm, as the preferred site for an Allied Forces radio communications base.
The following year the US Army Signal Corps built an array of radio antennas and a long, rectangular brick building with 18-inch thick walls reinforced to take a bomb blast.
The station was set 630m from the main road on low ground, which helped minimise radio interference.
Inside the secluded structure, US officers from Detachment 3 of the 832nd Signal Service Company received all incoming telecommunications across the theatre of war in the Pacific and relayed them to US General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters in Brisbane.
The radio antennas - arranged in a rhombic (or diamond) shape - allowed General MacArthur to receive coded communications from the chiefs of staff and President Franklin D Roosevelt in Washington DC.
The war is over
On 15 August 1945, the radio station was one of the first places in Australia to receive the message that the Japanese had surrendered and the war was over.
The station would likely also have received the official Instrument of Surrender message sent from aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945.
The site is now considered one of Australia’s most significant and intact examples of World War II infrastructure.
After the war, the station was used for several decades by the Postmaster-General’s Department (later Telecom) as a high-frequency receiving station and radio testing site. It remained under Australian Government ownership.
Saving history
Redland City Council took ownership of the station and the surrounding 61.78 hectares in December 2019. This followed the 2016 purchase of the adjoining Willards Farm, and the start of Council’s journey to create the Birkdale Community Precinct.
In November 2023, Council embarked on some essential repairs to the WWII Radio Receiving Station to help revitalise the building structure prior to its future restoration.
The roof and gutters were repaired in consultation with heritage specialists to ensure protection of the building’s important historical values.
Hazardous materials and some of the newer, unusable and unstable structures – added by past occupiers from 1950 onward – were also removed to make the area safer for Council staff, visitors and contractors.
Wi-Fi connections were added to help prepare the building for its ultimate purpose as a community space and it is currently being used as a temporary site office for the Birkdale Community Precinct project.