|
| Looking up Gill Street
with the Post Office tower on the right
|
Charters Towers
Superb historic mining town full of gracious buildings
and surrounded by numerous unusual and interesting
attractions.
Charters Towers is arguably the most beautiful inland city
in Queensland. It may not have the range of domestic
architecture that makes Ipswich so distinctive but in terms
of public architecture it is unrivalled. Like Kalgoorlie,
Cue and Coolgardie in Western Australia it is a city built
from the proceeds of goldmining and, as such, the city
fathers (a quixotic band of nouveau riche miners) were
determined to flaunt their wealth.
Located 130 km south-west of Townsville, 1506 km from
Brisbane via Townsville and 310 m above sea-level, Charters
Towers lies on gently undulating country 138 km east of the
Great Dividing Range. It is about 200 km east of the edge of
the vast flat plains which extend across to the Gulf of
Carpentaria and into far western Queensland.
There is considerable dispute about the town's name. One
claim is that the prospector Hugh Mosman named the area
'Charters Tors' after W.S.E.M. Charters who was the mining
warden at Ravenswood. It is true that there are three
low-lying hills around the town which could be described as
'tors'. Whatever the case the name was very short-lived. In
the Ravenswood Miner, just a month after gold was discovered
in December 1871, the area was referred to as Charters
Towers.
The story goes that Mosman and his party, which included
George Clarke and James Fraser, made their way to the hills.
A young Aboriginal boy whom they called Jupiter, who was
accompanying the group, lent down to drink from the local
creek while looking for horses that had bolted in a
thunderstorm. He saw gold-bearing quartz gleaming below the
surface and took it back to his employer who rode to Mosman
Ravenswood to register the claim and so the rush was on.
Mosman, who was rewarded by the government, adopted Jupiter
and educated him in the European manner.
This story, apocryphal or not, is recalled in the
Bicentennial Mosman and Jupiter statues which are located in
Centenary Park at the corner of Hackett Terrace and
Dalrymple Road - the main access roads from Townsville and
the Atherton Tablelands.
|
| The Bicentennial Mosman
and Jupiter statues in Centenary Park at the corner
of Hackett Terrace and Dalrymple Road
|
The discovery of gold led to a gold rush and the
establishment of the usual shanty town dwellings in the
area. However, shortly afterwards, reef gold was found and
the settlement became more permanent. It was around this
time that Charters Towers got the nickname 'The World'.
The rewards from the goldmining activities were huge. In
1878 the Day Dawn Gold Mining Company Ltd was floated with
shares of ten shillings. Within a year it had paid a
dividend of seven shillings and six pence. The Victory
Company was so successful that it virtually repaid its
original share price within three months.
During the 1880s and 1890s the town grew and prospered.
Hundreds of goldmining companies were floated, the railway
arrived in 1882, a miners union was established in 1886 and,
in 1893, Andrew Dawson (who went on to become the first
Labour premier in the world in 1899 when he became
Queensland premier) was elected as the local member. In 1884
'Breaker' Morant married Daisy May O'Dwyer (later Daisy
Bates) in Charters Towers. He abandoned his wife shortly
afterwards when a number of his cheques were dishonoured. It
was during this exuberant and dynamic period that a number
of solid Victorian buildings were constructed to reflect the
town's more permanent wealth.
By 1897 the editor of the North Queensland Mining
Register could write in his Mining History of Charters
Towers:
'All in 25 years. The well-wooded and comparatively flat
basin surrounding the small ridges below the Gap, through
which the Pioneers came, has long since been denuded of its
trees. Streets of fine shops and residences have sprung up,
cold air stores, telephones, electric light, gaslight,
electric fans and other adjuncts of up-to-date civilisation
are employed, and 20 000 souls now sleep nightly with a
radius of four miles of the spot where the prospectors
pitched their first camp a little over 25 years ago. The
three workers of that time have increased to 4 000 with
nearly three quarters of a million pounds worth of machinery
to aid in the hunt for gold.'
It was a sign of the extent of local business activity
that one of Australia's few regional stock exchanges was
established at Charters Towers in 1890 to raise capital for
the area's deep reef mines. It was connec ted to the world
beyond via telegraph. However, The town started to decline
in 1912 when the production of gold dropped from a high of
319 572 ounces in 1899 to a mere 96 046. This decline was
accompanied by a drop in population from 30 000 in 1899 to
16 000 in 1915. The stock exchange closed in 1916.
In recent times Charters Towers achieved a brush with
fame when it became the subject of one of the songs on John
Williamson's hugely successful Warragul album. The
Cattleman's Rest Motel and the local Caltex dealer come in
for special praise in the song which is evocative of the
town and the area. Also parts of the film The Irishman were
filmed in the area.
There are a number of excellent maps and booklets on
Charters Towers. The best short overview of the city's
golden days is Charters Towers and its Stock Exchange by Don
Roderick and published by the National Trust of Queensland.
The Charters Towers Tourist Information Map (produced by the
local Development Bureau) and A Guide to Charters Towers and
The Dalrymple Shire are available at the Visitor Information
Centre at 74 Mosman Street.
A particularly interesting publication is the local Lions
Club's Pocket Encylopaedia of 101 Facts about Charters
Towers and Dalrymple Shire which includes such gems as the
town once had 92 pubs (this may, in fact, be inaccurate as
other sources claim as many as 104 pubs at the peak of the
mining boom) and the deepest shaft dug during the gold
mining era reached 926.6 m below the surface.
Things to see:
The Visitor Information and Orientation Centre
The centre, at 74 Mosman St, is a good place to start an
exploration of the city. It has interactive displays and
audio-visual presentations relating to the town's past and
offers informative guided daily tours of the town's
attractions, known as the Ghosts of Gold Heritage Trail. It
takes in attractions otherwise inaccessible to the public,
such as the Assay Room and Mining Museum, tel: (07) 4752
0314.
Buildings - Mosman St (including the Zara Clark Museum
and the Stock Exchange Building)
Charters Towers has a large number of elegant and
historically significant buildings most of which are located
on Mosman and Gill Streets. In this area and in the
surrounding streets there are over 60 buildings of
historical significance.
One of the most interesting buildings in Mosman Street is
the Zara Clark Museum, a National Trust-owned and run centre
which was o nce a general merchant's shop. It has an
interesting collection of local memorabilia.
Further up the street is the City Hall, which was built
in 1891 at the height of the town's wealth. It was
originally the Queensland National Bank. It is a good symbol
of how, in the 1890s, the town needed to show the rest of
the world how prosperous it was. Nearby is the former
Australian Bank of Commerce which is a reminder that
financial crashes are not new. The bank was built, in the
most ostentatious style imaginable, by the Australian Joint
Stock Bank in 1891. The bank collapsed the following year.
At 74 Mosman Street the old Union Bank has been completely
restored and now houses the Charters Towers Visitor
Information Centre.
The centre of the town's financial district was located
at the intersection of Mosman and Gill Streets. Built in
1887-8 as a shopping arcade, 'The Royal Arcade' housed the
Charters Towers Stock Exchange from 1890 to 1916. Connected
to the outside world via telegraph, it was established to
raise capital for the area's deep reef mines but its closure
in 1916 reflected diminishing gold returns and a declining
population.
The choice of the Royal Arcade was an obvious one. The
proximity to banks, mining offices and the nearby Exchange
Hotel made it an ideal venue. The exchange closed down in
1916 as gold returns, and the population, declined. Today it
is used by local businesses and specialty shops. The
"Calling of the Card" audio presentation operates at the
former Stock Exchange four times daily and there are guided
tours available, tel: (07) 4752 0314.
The Stock Exchange Arcade is but one of the elegant
buildings in Mosman Street. There is also the City Hall and
the Australian Bank of Commerce. The latter has been
restored as The World Theatre and is now used as a
combination of civic theatre, cinema, gift shop, restaurant
and public art gallery. Guided tours are available of this
complecx which blends the heritage architecture of the
original building with state of the art theatre technology .
These buildings were characterised by the prevailing, and
rather ostentatious, architecture of the time which was a
combination of Classical Revival (with lots of columns) and
Victorian Italianate ornamentation.
Buildings - Gill St
One of Gill Street's more interesting buildings isthe Post
Office in Gill Street (1892), with a huge clock tower that
dominates the town. The clock was added to the building in
1898 after being imported from England. At 36 Gill Street is
the former Bank of New South Wales (1880) which is a near
perfect example of the Classical Revival style of
architecture which was all the rage at the time.
While having a number of imposing bank and public
buildings at the Mosman Street end, Gill St is far more the
commercial heart of the old city. It has some truly
fascinating shops. Until recently Stan Pollards Store still
had a flying fox for cash transactions. Money received from
transactions was placed into small containers which were
then propelled up wires to the cash clerk who was located on
a mezzanine floor above the counters. He calculated the
change and sent it whizzing back down to the counters. This
extraordinary device was a common feature of large country
stores until the 1950s. The flying fox has been removed to
the Zara Clark Museum. It is hoped that it will be
reinstated so it can be demonstrated. Also in Gill St is the
restored former ambulance station.
Other Buildings (including Ay-Ot Lookout)
A couple of blocks north of the main street (Gill Street) is
Lissner Park with the elegant Boer War Memorial Rotunda. It
was built in 1910 to commemorate the town's war dead and its
unusual ventilators and delicate, almost Victorian, styling
make it a building of exceptional beauty.
|
| The elegant Boer War
Memorial Rotunda in Lissner Park
|
To the west of the town centre, in Hodginson Street
(corner of High St), is Ay-Ot Lookout (1896) - a remarkable
wooden Victorian residence with some particularly striking
latticework and mouldings. It is open to the public weekdays
and, by arrangement only, on weekends, tel: (07) 4752 0314.
Also in Hodgkinson St is the old Court House (1886), which
took ten months to build, at a cost of £4565, and (between
Hodginson and Gill Streets) St Columba's Bell Tower (1887),
which has been designed to look like a mine poppet head.
The Venus Gold Battery
No visit to Charters Towers would be complete without a
guided tour through the old Venus Gold Battery (drive east
on Gill Street-Millchester Road five kilometres from the
Post Office and follow the signs). The Gold Battery itself
is acknowledged as one of Australia's most important
historical-industrial sites. It was one of the first
permanent batteries on the Charters Towers goldfields, being
established in 1872, when it was a public mill, becoming a
state battery from 1919 until its closure in 1973. It is the
largest surviving battery relic in Australia and the oldest
surviving battery in Queensland. Although it has not been
operational since 1973, guided daily tours provide a rare
insight into the scale of activity on the goldfields in the
early days.
Since June 2003 the Venus Gold Battery has become part of
the Ghosts of Gold Heritage Trail. Here visitors can watch
an audio-visual presentation of the battery and the process
used in extracting gold from out of the quartz within which
it was embedded. The second viewing features the Ghosts of
Gold on the spectacular water screen.
The Venus Gold Battery is open from 9.30 a.m. - 4.30 p.m.
Of the 29 batteries that operated in Charters Towers only
the Venus Battery still exists.
Lookouts
There are a couple of good lookouts which offer excellent
views over the town and the surrounding area. The best is
undoubtedly Towers Hill Lookout (ask at the Venus Battery
for directions), which rises about 125 metres above the
plain. It has interpretive displays and an amphitheatre
where a film about the history of Charters Towers screen at
night-time. Another local lookout is the Rotary Lookout,
signposted off Mosman Street.
Swimming and Fishing
15 km east of the Venus Gold Battery is the Flat Rock
camping reserve with two kilometres of frontage onto the
Burdekin River. It is an excellent fishing and swimming
spot. Fishing can also be enjoyed at Burdekin Dam which is
stocked annually with barramundi.
10 Days in the Towers/The Country Music Festival
Commencing in 2004, the Country Music Festival (occurring on
the May Day weekend) has been incorporated into 10 Days in
the Towers which, as it suggests, is carried out over ten
days filled with line dancing, bush poetry, workshops,
street busking etc.
Australian Businesses for sale
Caravan Parks for sale
Motels for sale
Hotels for sale
Broadwalk Business Brokers
Businesses for Sale in Charters Towers Buy or Sell Hotels, Motels, Caravan Parks, Bed & Breakfast,
Pubs, Wine Bars, Restaurants, Cafe, English Tea Rooms, Coffee Shops,
Deli, Catering Business, Pubs, Bars, Sandwich Bars, Pizza Delivery,
Bakeries, Hot Food Take-away, Fish & Chips, Petrol & Service Stations,
Australian Businesses for sale, Car Sales, Motor & Transport, Car/Van
Hires, Newsagents, Dry Cleaners, Salons, General Stores, Retail Stores,
Post Office, Printers, Convenience Stores, Clothes shop, Hair Dressers,
Beauty Salon, Fruit Markets, Butchers, Florist, Card & Gift shop, Sports
shop, Book Shops, Care Agency, Pharmacy, Tool-Hardware & DIY shops, Pet
Shops, Auto Mechanical, Auto Parts & Accessories,
Bakery Businesses for sale , Motel sales, caravan park sales, Hotel
sales, Business sales, Bar for sale, Juice Bar for sale,
Beauty Salon for sale, Bike and Motorcycle Businesses for sale ,
Australian Businesses for sale, Blinds and Shutters Businesses for sale , Boat Business for sale ,
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Café Business for sale, Car Dealerships for sale, Car Rental
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hotels for sale, Ice Cream Businesses for sale , Juice Bar for sale, Laundrette ' s for sale, Lawn Mowing Businesses for sale , Magazine
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Preschool for sale, Pest Control Businesses for sale ,Business for
sale Pet Shop, Plumbing Businesses for sale , Post Office for sale ,
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for sale, Supermarkets for sale, Takeaway Businesses for sale ,
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Machine Businesses for sale , Wholesale Businesses for sale,
Wrecking Yard for sale in Charters Towers.
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