Friendly Heart

Cloncurry is the friendly heart of the great north west as a welcome crossroads with a strong community spirit. Locals stop here to yarn about dramas and dreams of outback life. The Curry has many rewards for the traveller who decides to dwell a while. The town is a unique cultural mix in a natural wonderland. There are museums, pubs, great food, fossicking and the biggest cattle stations and copper mines in Australia.

Natural Wonderland

A landscape of rocky hills and creeks, gidgee trees and buffel grass downs changes with weather and shifting skies. A mosaic of coloured rockforms hides great mineral riches within, from black gold to ruby-red cuprite. Animals abound, with two unique bird species: the vivid Cloncurry parrot and the tiny Kalkadoon grass wren.

Outback Legends

Mitakoodi, Kalkadoon and Pitta Pitta Aboriginal people lived and worked this place for generations. They fought frontier wars with pastoralists and prospectors to contest lands and customs.

Cloncurry breathes cattle and has copper and gold in its veins. In 1867 Ernest Henry and Roger Sheaffe started a joint pastoral-mining venture on the banks of Cloncurry River, named by the ill-fated explorer Robert O￿Hara Burke in 1861. The town was proclaimed in 1884 and boomed into the 20th century with merchants, carriers, miners, builders, bakers and battlers. Cloncurry was the biggest, boisterous town in outback Queensland between 1880s and 1960s.

During WW1 Cloncurry was the main source of Australian copper, with 7000 people working many mines and four smelters. After a century of boom and bust, Cloncurry now enters the 21st century with the biggest mining operations in Australia.

Wireless and aviation combined in Cloncurry to create the uniquely Australian ￿flying doctor￿ service. John Flynn and his Australian Inland Mission established the aerial medical service in 1928, after Qantas started operations to Cloncurry in 1922.

Transport Hub

Cloncurry has always been the transport hub of the great north west; horses, bullocks, camels, coaches, railways, trucks, planes, helicopters and motorhomes. It pioneered the use of flight to overcome outback isolation and was a WW2 airbase for the Pacific war. Curry is still the most important transportation centre in western Queensland, a combination rail head, container depot and road train terminus.

Cultural Diversity

Cloncurry is a lively, multi-racial town. Aboriginal people have intermarried with European, Chinese and Afghan newcomers for the past 120 years. In 1900 Cloncurry was a Ghantown with 200 Afghans working over 2000 camels. Chinese market gardens also bloomed along Coppermine Creek.

Town Heritage Trails & Pub Crawls

A stroll through the main streets reveals many original timber buildings from around 100 years ago, notably the Post Office, Court House, Brodie￿s Store and Cloncurry Pharmacy. Cloncurry hotels also reveal many tales of fire, frolics and feasting. Take a pub crawl to the old Post Office, Central, Leichhardt or Oasis Hotels.

Outskirts

The Rotary Lookout presents a favourite panorama of Cloncurry river and town. Chinaman Creek Dam and reservoir provides a shady community picnic area as well as the town water supply. Nearby is Mt. Leviathan, known locally as Black Mountain because of its black ore. It￿s also worth a visit to the eerie Mary Kathleen township and uranium mine site abandoned in 1982. Visits to new operations at Ernest Henry and Great Australian mines can be arranged. And there are many fossicking sites for alluvial gold, garnets, amethysts, quartz and fluorite for amateur collectors.

Highlights of Cloncurry￿s social calendar include the annual Show, the Stockman￿s Challenge, Camp Draft and the Merry Muster rodeo which boasts the biggest single payout in Australia.