EDWIN BODE- Pioneering artist of the Gold Coast Hinterland

Edwin Bode was a painter and photographer who travelled throughout Queensland painting watercolours of homesteads in exchange for board and lodging. A longtime resident of Canungra, on his death in 1926 the town’s residents paid for his sandstone tombstone, which featured a palette and brushes and was inscribed ‘Erected by the many friends and admirers of our natural artist, E. Bode, in memory of his glorious work’

His gravesite is located at Wonglepong, in the Gold Coast Hinterland, near Canungra.

The painter and photographer, was born in Birmingham, England. He spent his formative years in Suffolk, where he became a great admirer of John Constable’s art. He came to Australia in the Firth of Clyde because of a chronic chest complaint, arriving in Queensland in 1882. Initially he worked at various jobs, including being employed at the Ipswich lime pits and at the Butley sawmills at Coomera as a saw sharpener.

With the money earned, he purchased 160 acres on Maybury Creek adjoining the Coomera River beside the Gorge Road to Canungra, planted a citrus orchard, including 300 orange trees whose fruit he sold in Brisbane (largely unprofitably because of costs of packing and transport), and built a modest house ‘Maybury’ (the property was also known as Bodesville at various times).

Bode brought out an oil painting from England, Close Friends and My Home Road , which stood unframed on an easel in his house for many years; when the Walker family purchased Maybury from Bode it was the only object that remained in the house. It now resides in the replica of Bode’s Hut in Canungra after being rescued from a fire in 1900 by the Walkers. Bode moved to Canungra in 1886 where he lived in a small hut opposite the cemetery. He travelled throughout the agrarian hinterland, working on properties in the Canungra, Wonglepong and Mt Tamborine regions,