Rockhampton
Located on the Tropic of Capricorn in Darumbal country, Rockhampton is Queensland's fourth largest city outside the state's southeast corner and the effective capital of the Capricornia region.
European settlement began when Charles and William Archer arrived in 1853, seeking grazing land and encountering the Fitzroy River. They took up a run near Gracemere after the New South Wales government proclaimed two new pastoral districts (Port Curtis and Leichhardt) in January 1854.
Since the Fitzroy provided a convenient waterway for shipping supplies and produce, the Archer brothers constructed a wool shed downstream of a bar that prevented further upstream navigation. The rocks and the Saxon word designating a farm by a river bend prompted the settlement's name.
The town was proclaimed and surveyed in 1858, just before the Canoona gold rush brought the influx of would-be miners that briefly transformed Rockhampton into newly separated Queensland's second-largest port.
While Canoona proved a flash in the pan, subsequent discoveries at Mount Morgan, once one of the world's most productive gold mines, laid the foundations for much of the city's prosperity.
Through the 1860s and '70s, Rockhampton developed as Central Queensland's main port, with wool as the main export.
New ports subsequently developed on the coast, near the mouth of the Fitzroy River. at Broadmount and Port Alma. Still, Rockhampton continued to serve as the hinterland's commercial hub.
