Camooweal
Located in Wakaya country 169 kilometres northwest of Mount Isa, 1070 kilometres west of Bowen and around 10 kilometres east of the Northern Territory border, Camooweal lies on the divide between the tributaries of the Nicholson River that flow northwards to the Gulf of Carpentaria and those that drain south and west into the Georgina River and the Lake Eyre basin.
William Landsborough passed through the area on his search for the missing Burke and Wills expedition in 1861. After George Sutherland took up the Rocklands pastoral lease in 1865 with 8,000 sheep stock losses due to Indigenous resistance, dingos and wedge-tailed eagles and lack of water forced him to abandon his lease. Benjamin Crosthwaite and William Tetley were marginally more successful when they took up the lease in 1876.
The initial township by Lake Francis, gazetted on a ten-square-kilometre site surveyed by George Telford Weale in the early 1880s, was re-gazetted and relocated the following year. It had a Post Office and Police Station by 1886, a Provisional School by the end of 1896 and a town bore to supply artesian water by the end of 1897.
Sources:
- Google Maps (directions and distances)
- Wikipedia: Camooweal
