Clermont
Located at the junction of the Gregory and Peak Downs highways on Wangan and Babbinburra Country in the Isaac Region, around 88 kilometres north-northwest of Emerald, 240 kilometres southwest of Mackay and 290 kilometres west-northwest of Rockhampton, Clermont serves as a hub for the Peak Downs region's coal mines and agricultural properties in the area.
After Ludwig Leichhardt passed through the area in 1845, squatters, including Oscar de Satge, who invested in several pastoral runs, moved into the new pastoral district that bore Leichhardt's name after it was declared in 1854.
The discovery of gold near a seasonal lagoon — Hoods Lagoon, subsequently Diggers Lagoon — in 1861 saw Charles Frederick Gregory name the town site he surveyed in December 1863 after de Satge's home town of Clermont-L'Herault in Occitania/Languedoc-Pyrénées.
The town reserve was proclaimed in March 1864, and while the population ebbed and flowed, Charles Buzacott began publishing the Peak Downs Telegram and Queensland Mining Record in 1864.
By that time, the Peak Downs Copper Company was already working a rich copper lode, which developed into the historic mining towns of North Copperfield and South Copperfield — approximately 4 kilometres south-west of Clermont's town centre — that produced 17,000 tonnes of refined copper over fifteen years.
A separate Copperfield municipality, created in 1872, had its own newspaper, the Copperfield Miner, eight hotels and a population of around 2000 people in its heyday, but by the end of the decade, falling prices and competition from more lucrative mines at Cloncurry and Mount Perry halved that figure.
An influx of Chinese miners — there were up to four thousand digging for gold and copper in the 1880s — led to racial riots and the removal of the Chinese from the region in 1888. Mining for copper revived in the late 1890s and continued until 1942.
In the meantime, a railway line from Emerald to Clermont opened in February 1884.
The subsequent development of coal mines in the area — the deposit at nearby Blair Athol, discovered in 1864, first mined in 1890 and finally closed in November 2012 exported up to 12 million tonnes of thermal coal annually — ensured the town's relative prosperity. Glencore's Clermont mine, 12 kilometres northwest of the town, continues to produce up to 12 million tonnes a year.
Clermont's location on low-lying ground next to the lagoon meant flooding was a perennial problem. After major floods in 1870, 1893 and 1896, a fcatastrophic inundation in 1916, killed 65 of the town's population of 1,500 — it remains one of Australia's worst natural disasters in terms of life lost — and prompted a relocation of many of the town's wooden buildings to a new townsite on higher ground south of the lagoon using a steam traction engine.
