O'Connell River
From headwaters in the Clarke Range, just north of the Eungella National Park, the O'Connell River flows north through Giya Country parallel with the Bruce Highway, before a right-hand turn south of Lethebrook — 18 kilometres south of Proserpine — takes it towards the coast to discharge into Repulse Bay. The river drains a 2,388-square-kilometre catchment.
George Elphinstone Dalrymple, Commissioner of Crown Lands for the Kennedy District (1861-62), named the lower reaches of the Proserpine River after Maurice Charles O'Connell in March 1862. The name was later applied to a different stream after further investigations of the area revealed Dalrymple's O'Connell River was the lower end of a stream that had already been named.
An article in the Brisbane Courier describing Dalrymple's discovery of the Pioneer and O'Connell Rivers throws some light on the confused identities of streams around Proserpine:
Another stream of some importance between Port Denison and Rockhampton is the O'Connell, of which Mr Dalrymple was also the discoverer, and which will yet be found useful for purposes of navigation. Its mouth was first seen by Mr D. from the deck of the colonial sloop Spitfire, in 1860, and again, as late as March last, the same gentleman, on his overland journey from Port Denison to Rockhampton, struck this river about two miles above its mouth. From the summit of a low hill, from which he obtained a good bird's-eye view, he was enabled to follow its course, from its issue in the South Western Ranges, and thence winding through the low country to its point of embouchure in the southern end of Repulse Bay. Its mouth is quite as broad as that of the Brisbane, and Mr. Dalrymple believes, from the fact of there being rocky islands off the mouth, and from the absence of " break," that there is little or no obstruction in the shape of a bar. Mr Dalrymple followed the river up for about fifteen miles before he could find a crossing place for his horses above the tide-way, and he therefore believes the latter to be about twenty miles in length.
Mr. Dalrymple states that he crossed magnificently rich country on the banks and side valleys of this river, better adapted for the cultivation of cotton, sugar, coffee, rice, tobacco, and other tropical productions than any coast land in Australia. The river, which he named the O'Connell, takes its rise from the high Fort Cooper Ranges, which form the watershed of the Isaacs Bowen, O'Connell, and McKay Rivers.
