Early access to the Redcliffe peninsula The first road along the route was an
Aboriginal track used to access
Kippa Ring, then the site of a prominent
bora ring located about north-west of Redcliffe.
Tom Petrie guided a picnic party to the Redcliffe seashore from
Petrie (then known as North Pine) in 1859. A road from
Bald Hills to Redcliffe was formed by the early 1860s, but by 1864 this was almost impassable. Tom Petrie marked a track from the
Hays Inlet crossing and in the early 1870s assisted in surveying the road. Known as the "Brisbane Road" it became the primary way of accessing the Redcliffe Peninsula by road. and his involvement with the Avenue was honoured on Sunday 9 April 1933 with the unveiling of the Rothwell monument by the Queensland governor, Sir
Leslie Wilson. This stone obelisk was placed on a small triangular piece of land at the intersection of Anzac Memorial Avenue and the Deception Bay Road, later moving to a nearby park () when a roundabout was placed on the site. Rothwell bequeathed the substantial sum of to the tree planting committee, which was acknowledged at the unveiling as having maintained the project.
Subsequent years The building of Anzac Memorial Avenue reduced Redcliffe's isolation from Brisbane and consolidated its position as the city's seaside resort of choice. In 1928, the Brisbane Courier remarked, "Petrie is today notable for the traffic which passes through it day and night". By the mid-1930s, the Brisbane-Redcliffe bus ran five trips daily, with extra services on weekends. A 1933 tourist brochure described the recent progress of Redcliffe as "remarkable", evidenced by the erection of new villas and cottages on the peninsula. In the same year Redcliffe Mayor Alfred Henry Langdon praised the construction of the road for advancing Redcliffe "beyond the expectations of the most sanguine". The opening of the
Hornibrook Bridge in 1935 further reduced the distance between Brisbane and Redcliffe, a catalyst for the area's permanent population growth. While originally named Anzac Memorial Avenue, the road is more widely known and signed as Anzac Avenue. Other older trees have also not survived and records relating to the avenue once held by the RACQ and Main Roads Department no longer exist. The Cocos palms planted at Petrie by Governor Nathan in 1925 and the hoop pine planted in Redcliffe by Lord Stonehaven in 1926 still remain. Despite alterations, the idea of the road as a Memorial Avenue has been perpetuated by later plantings. While not all the trees are from the original planting list, they are an intrinsic component of the avenue's overall composition. The
Mango Hill section of the Avenue is notable for its section of Mango trees (
Magnifera indica). There is a substantial section of mature Slash Pines (
Pinus eliottii) between Kippa Ring and Rothwell, plus smaller sections at
Kallangur. The first Slash Pines in Queensland were grown in
Beerwah and Beerburrum from 1924. Director of Forestry Edward Swain, who introduced the trees from the United States, was a member of the tree planting committee in 1925. Since the 1990s, along the Pine Rivers section of the road, different memorials commemorating theatres of war since 1945 have been erected. Despite the construction of the
Hornibrook Bridge in 1935 providing an alternative route by car to the Redcliffe peninsula, traffic volumes along Anzac Avenue steadily increased as the years went by, necessitating duplication of some sections of the road in the 1980s and the 1990s. This widening, although required in order to manage traffic congestion, resulted in the need to remove or relocate some of the tree plantings along the route, a move that was not without controversy at the time. Although originally primarily a rural route, increasing population growth in the area, most notably the development of entirely new suburbs such as
Rothwell and
North Lakes, has meant that much of the route has taken on a suburban character, providing everyday access to residents, rather than being a tourist drive, as originally planned. The road was inducted onto the
Queensland Heritage Register in 2009. == Description ==