Annan River
Rising in the Yorkey Range below Mount Romeo near Rossville, north-northwest of Wujal Wujal, the Annan River (Kuku Nyungkal: Yuku Baja) flows north and then turns east to discharge into the Coral Sea at Walker Bay, around 7 kilometres south-southeast of Cooktown. The river's 66-kilomertre course drains a relatively small (750-square-kilometre) catchment that includes the Black Mountain (Kalkajaka) and Annan River (Yuku Baja-Muliku) National Parks.
The Mulligan Highway crosses the Annan twice — once near Rossville and again closer to its mouth.
Somerset-bound police magistrate John Jardine named the stream after Scotland's River Annan when HMS Salamander visited the area on 11 November 1865. When William Hann passed through the area seven years later, he mistook the stream for the nearby Endeavour River.
European miners moved onto the Annan's upper reaches after Charles Ross discovered tin at Mount Amos, then Mounts Hartley, Leswell and Romeo in 1885, prompting a small-scale tin mining rush the following year. Over the next few decades, a small but vibrant tin mining industry worked lucrative tin deposits found in underground lodes, creek beds and the river's banks, providing the subject matter for Ion Idress' The Tin Scratchers (1959).
