Bowen
Located on the 20th South parallel on Queensland's northeast coast, midway between Townsville and 990 kilometres north of Brisbane in Biri and Yuru country, Bowen is The North's oldest European settlement.
James Cook named Cape Gloucester, Holbourne Island, Edgecumbe Bay and Mount Upstart when he passed the area in early June 1770. Shipwreck survivor James Morrill visited the locality during his seventeen years as a castaway following the wreck of the Peruvian.
European settlers arrived in the area after Captain Henry Sinclair discovered Port Denison in 1859, and a Queensland government expedition identified the harbour as the best port on that stretch of coast.
George Elphinstone Dalrymple led an overland party of prospective squatters and Native Mounted Police while Sinclair's Santa Barbara and the Jeannie Dove carried a seaborne party that camped on nearby Stone Island until Dalrymple's group arrived. The two groups combined to found the new township on 11 April 1861.
Dalrymple had previously noted a significant indigenous population, and frontier violence followed almost immediately. Within the first six weeks after they arrived, the Native Police and armed settlers conducted at least six operations against the local people, driving them out of the area and pursuing them by sea.
Despite a promising start as squatters and their flocks of sheep flooded into the new Kennedy Pastoral District and the confident expectations of its early residents, a combination of factors centred around a location that was too far to the south and on the wrong side of the Burdekin River saw Townsville eclipse Bowen as The North's effective capital. The decision to start the railway line to the goldfields in Charters Towers and Ravenswood from Townsville and a combination of bad luck and missed opportunities sealed the matter.
The town's jetty was rebuilt after it was found to be worm-ridden in 1875. A meatworks that opened on nearby Poole Island was damaged by the cyclone that flattened the town in 1884 and failed within a few years. Although a new meatworks opened at Merinda in 1897 and continued operating for almost a hundred years, other ventures fizzled out, fell by the wayside or failed to eventuate.
Queensland's brief venture into state socialism under T. J. Ryan's Labor government during the First World War was supposed to bring a steelworks powered by coal from Collinsville to the town. However, London financiers failed to come to the party.
Still, despite repeated setbacks, Bowen's agricultural industry grew thanks to an equable climate that proved ideal for growing mangoes, tomatoes and other salad vegetables.
A coke works processed coal from Collinsville and shipped its products to Mount Isa, and a saltworks with 170 hectares of evaporative ponds opened on the town's outskirts in 1925.
Construction of the bulk-coal-handling port at Abbot Point in the early 1980s and subsequent expansion projects produced brief but intermittent upturns. However, the local economy, which remains based mainly on agriculture and logistics associated with the coal-mining industry, with some spinoffs from Whitsunday Islands' tourism and the annual winter migration of the grey nomads.
Links to add:
Abbot Point
Biri
Charters Towers
Collinsville
Edgecumbe Bay
Henry Sinclair
Holbourne Island
James Morrill
Kennedy Pastoral District
Merinda
Mount Isa
Mount Upstart
Peruvian
Queensland Native Mounted Police
Ravenswood
T. J. Ryan
Whitsunday Islands
