Rifle Creek
The Queensland Place Names Database identifies five watercourses — in Croydon, Barcaldine, Cloncurry, Mareeba and Burke Shires — named Rifle Creek. Although the database has 'No details available' about the names' Origin or History, given the locations, it is hard to avoid jumping to rather obvious conclusions.
Mareeba Shire:
Crossing the Mulligan Highway 41 kilometres north-northwest of Mareeba and 28 kilometres southwest of Port Douglas, around the boundary between Djabugay and Kuku Yalanji Country, Rifle Creek was the site of at least one significant massacre.
In 1880, after Djabugay raids in which he lost 8 draught horses, prospector turned packhorse carrier Patrick Molloy, whose selection was located on Rifle Creek, and other settlers and a party of Native Mounted Police tracked the alleged perpetrators to the creek's headwaters. After the party surrounded the camp, those who showed fight were dispersed and taught a lesson that cured their taste for horse flesh for a considerable time. In fact some of them lost it altogether.
While the Queensland Place Names Database offers no details regarding the origin or history, it seems the creek's name stemmed from an earlier incident:
The Port Douglas road passed the Grass Humpy, on Rifle Creek (afterwards the place was called Weatherboard). It was here that the first serious encounter with the blacks took place. A large camp of whites was on the flat, and their horses ran close by, but during the night they strayed near the scrub, and the blacks, in great force, attacked the horses. : The diggers were powerless to interfere in the darkness, but in the morning they dispersed a few stragglers. Jim Jennings was
that crowd and had one horse speared. Altogether 11 horses were speared, and most of them died. The ground around where the horses were speared showed these weapons stiicking out of the ground like pinsin a cushion. It was here the blacks learned to respect Snider rifles. They had formerly ridiculed the mere sound of a gun. Rifle Creek taught them. Close by is Spear Creek,
called because the last man of the party going into camp was speared though not fatally. (Ajax, Geology and History of North Queensland)
