How ferry crossings work in Australia
Australian crossings fall into two groups that have almost nothing in common: river cable ferries run as free public road, and island services run as commercial transport.
The river crossings are part of the road. A council or a state transport department operates a cable ferry or a barge because building a bridge was never justified, and on many of them the crossing is free and runs from early morning until late at night. They stop for flood, for low water and for scheduled maintenance, and the announcement appears on a council service-alerts page rather than anywhere a traveller would think to look.
The island services are the opposite. Passenger ferries and vehicle barges to the same island are frequently different operators, running from different wharves, on different timetables, with separate fares. Booking a car onto a barge and walking onto a passenger ferry are two unrelated transactions, and treating them as one service is the most common mistake made about these routes.
Time zones need care. Queensland does not observe daylight saving and New South Wales does, so two crossings a few hundred kilometres apart share a clock for half the year and diverge for the other half. South Australia sits half an hour off the eastern states, and Western Australia two hours behind. Every timetable here is shown in the time zone of the departure wharf, labelled with the zone actually in force on the day.
Season means something different in the north. In tropical Queensland the wet season, not winter, is what closes a crossing, and school holidays change frequency across the whole country. Where a service is seasonal, the page states which season it is publishing and the dates it covers.