About Us
Welcome to Ferryhawk, a part of The Hawkins Family Group, which also includes Moreton Island Adventures and the Micat Ferry, the only vehicle and passenger ferry that runs to Moreton Island.
Our Journey
Our story began in the 1920s as a heavy road transport business, proudly operated across three generations of the Hawkins family.
In the 1970s, the family purchased a holiday home on Moreton Island, a decision that would shape the future of our business. At the time, Neville Hawkins was leading the company. He quickly recognised a growing need on the island: reliable transport for both passengers and freight.
This expansion ultimately led to the creation of Micat, our custom-built ferry launched in 2004, carrying up to 52 vehicles and over 400 passengers per trip. Today, the Hawkins Family Group is proudly owned by Roz Shaw, a fourth-generation family member, with leadership now in the hands of her daughter, Liz Hemmens.
As operators of a major vehicle, passenger, and freight ferry, we recognized the need for a smooth booking experience. After testing various booking systems, we developed Ferryhawk—a modern SaaS platform designed by ferry operators, for ferry operators.
Meet Our Team
Liz Hemmens
Chief Executive Officer
I’ve worked in the ferry industry on Moreton Island since I can remember. Having spent so much time there, I am very passionate about the area and take great pride in running the Micat ferry. I studied law and accounting at university, taking up a position as Legal Counsel at National Storage (an ASX200 company), which helped me gain practical, hands-on experience with corporate law and business – to understand the pressure points, strategy, and objectives of the business whilst balancing risk and legal implications. I then returned to the family business to work alongside Roz, bringing my lifelong passion for technology and business to the Micat. I took over as CEO in 2018 and have focused particularly on optimising our online booking process, where I found myself continually frustrated by the restrictive/expensive/US-centric ferry booking software available. Our staff were spending hours on the phone each day answering the same questions and performing basic booking admin. Our booking system was slow, clunky and performing poorly from the front and back end. I didn’t blame the customers for preferring to phone us! Over the past five years I’ve worked on multiple overhauls of our booking system to the point where I am confident we have the ideal solution for International ferry operators. We also overhauled the website to maximise online bookings and research, saving employee time, clearing the phone lines, and allowing customers to fully manage their own bookings 24/7/365. Whilst talking with fellow ferry operators over the years, common threads of complaint with regards to inflexible booking software were raised. As we’ve worked on optimising the FerryHawk booking system over the past decade, we realised an opportunity to help others in the same situation by creating a booking system which helps users rather than hinders them. Drawing on our many collective years of experience in running a vehicular ferry, we’ve created FerryHawk software to help your company maximise revenue from bookings whilst being completely flexible to your needs.
Roz Shaw
Chairman
I’ve worked in the ferry industry since I was six, when my parents started operating a small ferry to Kooringal, Moreton Island in 1971. We were a typical family business starting out with mixed roles for everyone – all the kids pitched in! Since then I have always been interested not only in the ferry industry, but in business as a whole. I’ve always been fascinated with breaking down parts of a business – to look at each task a business must undertake and find ways to make it more efficient, and therefore more profitable. Along the way, I managed and then purchased our family business in heavy transport and truckstops, eventually selling these operations to global businesses due to the superior systems and processes we had implemented. In the early 2000’s we designed the Micat Catamaran Vehicular Ferry to enable the crossing to be quick enough to cater for day trippers to Moreton Island. Prior to this, the landing crafts being used were too slow and too rough to make day trips viable. The design was a great success and the Micat is still the most formidable vehicular ferry in Queensland. When my daughter Liz joined the business, she brought with her the most important skill set in the world today – a love of information technology. This was a game changer and the reason Ferryhawk was formed. With a lifetime of ferry experience, Liz was able to pinpoint the operational issues which could be improved through technology. WIth a focus on the online bookings and ferry logistics, Liz worked in conjunction with a team of developers to design a custom reservation system which solves all the common issues Australian ferry operators face. That brings us to today – where we are proud to offer FerryHawk software to other ferry owners. It’s been built from the ground up with over 50 years of experience in the industry.