After two cross-border relocations, dismemberment, and a midnight barge crossing, an old Queenslander and its intrepid owners wash up on a tiny island. And that’s just the start of the adventure.
Words Fiona Donnelly
SWASHBUCKLING is a term usually associated with pirates. But the courage to “engage in daring and romantic adventures with bravado” is an apt description of the most recent project undertaken by Anna and Andrew Swain, who trucked, then floated, an entire house from a northern New South Wales town to a tiny Queensland island.
They describe themselves as serial house renovators. Anna is an artist, photographer, author and stylist-designer; Andrew is a recently retired builder. He found unexpected national fame during the pandemic as the choirmaster of Dustyesky, a male singing group known as “Australia’s only fake‑genuine Russian choir”, which went on to perform to full houses at the Sydney Opera House.
This is the couple’s eleventh renovation project together, but they don’t fit the stereotypical house-flipper profile. And the story of Seabird, their transplanted Queenslander, and how it arrived on Lamb Island (Ngudooroo) just off the south-eastern Queensland coast is an unlikely renovation story.
After a difficult migration from northern New South Wales, the old Queenslander known as Seabird is now perched among paperbarks overlooking the water at Lamb Island (Ngudooroo) in Moreton Bay. Photograph by Kara Rosenlund.
On its journey north, Seabird weathered record floods and was sawn into three. It was trucked across state borders during Covid lockdowns, then loaded onto a barge at high tide under a full moon and floated across Moreton Bay.
