In the early 1900s the Queensland Cement and Lime Company pioneered the production of Portland cement in Queensland. Initially, it obtained the calcium carbonate it needed to make the cement from a limestone quarry in southern Queensland, but in the 1930s it turned instead to Moreton Bay’s coral reefs. For more than six decades, right up to 1997, QCL dredged coral from various reefs and carried the coral up the Brisbane River to a wharf near the company’s factory at Darra. By the 1990s it had removed nearly all the reefs around Mud Island and along the eastern side of St Helena Island and had consumed much of the reef at Empire Point. What prompted QCL to make the switch from rock limestone to coral? How did the company come to devour so much of the bay’s coral? And what finally brought coral dredging to an end? These are the questions The Coral Dredgers sets out to answer.