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Cunnamulla (Aboriginal meaning “long stretch of water”) is a small town that lies on the Warrego River in South West Queensland. It is situated at the intersection of the Mitchell Highway and the Balonne Highway.

The original indigenous inhabitants of the area were the Kunja. The area’s first European explorer was Thomas Mitchell who passed through the region in 1846. A settlement arose here because there was a reliable waterhole where two major stock routes intersected.

The town itself came into being in the late 19th century as a coach stop for Cobb and Co coaches. A town survey was conducted in 1868, the same year a courthouse was built. A railway to the town was completed in 1899.

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Digital Image ID 20832

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Hughenden, a rural town, is situated on the Flinders River 320 km south-west of Townsville. In 1861-62 two search parties for the Burke and Wills expedition, the Landsborough and Frederick Waler expeditions, reported favourably on the pastoral prospects around the Flinders River and the Jardine Valley.

Several pastoralists set out for the district. The first of them, Ernest Henry, took up five pastoral runs, one of them named Hughenden after his grandfather’s property in Buckinghamshire, England. In 1877 a township was surveyed and named after Henry’s pastoral station.

Somewhat in advance of the railway reaching the district, Hughenden was a prosperous pastoral area. By 1882 Hughenden had a court house, two hotels, stores, a hospital, a post office, a school (1880) and a Jockey Club. It was the administrative centre of the Hughenden local government division, separated from the Doonmunya division in 1882.

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Queensland Places

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Bundaberg Court House is a heritage-listed former court house (1882-1958) and former police station (1958-1997) at Quay Street, Bundaberg, Queensland. It is a rendered masonry and timber building constructed between 1882 and 1884.

The township of Bundaberg increased in both demographic size and political influence during the late nineteenth century, stimulating the demand for public buildings that reflected this affluence. Originally designed as a smaller timber building, a larger brick building was the resultant design from the Department of Public Works and Housing, more befitting to the political importance and economic stature of Bundaberg.

The court house was designed by George St Paul Connolly, acting Queensland Colonial Architect in the Queensland Department of Public Works. Following the “T” shape design developed during the nineteenth century, the major consideration in the design and planning of the building was the allowance for the correct movement of people in

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Boulia is a tiny settlement on the edge of the desert. The name of the town means either ‘waterhole’ or ‘clear water’ in the language of the local Pitta Pitta Aborigines.

The first Europeans to pass through the area were the ill-fated Burke and Wills in 1861. A kind of town was first settled in 1876. It was at the western limit of pastoral land and was nothing more than a collection of tents.

By 1879 there was a store at a waterhole. This was the beginning of the town. The end of the 1880s saw the town as the administrative centre for the far northwest of Queensland with a courthouse, police barracks and post office.

Description source:
Aussie Towns

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Digital Image ID 20783

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Aramac is a small town and locality in the Barcaldine Region, Queensland. In the 1850s, pastoralist and future Premier of Queensland Robert Ramsey Mackenzie travelled through the area, which was on the traditional lands of the Iningai. He blazed a tree with the inscription ‘R R Mac’, which was later corrupted into the name of the town.

In 1867 an employee of Aramac Station, John William Kingston, opened a bark-hut store at an outlying point on the Aramac Creek. Enlarged two years later to include a hotel (Kingston’s Bazaar), Kingston’s settlement was declared a town site in 1869 and surveyed as a town in 1875. It was the region’s first town, and the centre of the first local-government division.

Recollections of an 1878 visit to Aramac were published in the Rockhampton Morning Bulletin in 1933, describing the township as consisting of “neat weatherboard structures, painted, and comprising

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