Baffle Creek, 90 kilometres north of Bundaberg, Queensland, and 200 kilometres south of Gladstone, these days is used mainly as a water resource and for recreational purposes, but in the early years of white settlement in Queensland, before there were rail lines and a road network, it was an important thoroughfare for local commerce, although its fortunes fluctuated. This article charts the history of the creek as a commercial waterway across the second half of the 1900s, and of the ships that sailed it and were wrecked on its bar. By the turn of the century, Baffle Creek could not compete as a port with the developing coastal towns nearby, nor with the railway line to its west that gradually linked communities along Queensland's south-east coast. Nevertheless, the creek provides an example of how a relatively small Queensland waterway served as an important lifeline for pastoral families and an important conduit for commerce in a coastal hinterland at a time of critical development for the area.