Ravenswood
One hundred kilometres south of Townsville in Gugu Badhun country within the boundaries of the Charters Towers Regional Council, the historic gold-mining town of Ravenswood has seen a recent revival of mining activity after decades as a virtual ghost town. In its heyday, the town's population reached five thousand, and miners slaked their thirst at forty-eight hotels.
Prospectors had tried their luck in widespread locations across North Queensland in the wake of the gold rush to Cape River in 1866, and several alluvial finds were reported before a Townsville-based named Brooks found payable alluvial gold on Ravenswood pastoral run in 1868. A rush ensued, and the township that developed on Elphinstone Creek took the name of the pastoral run, which reputedly stems from a character in Sir Walter Scott's 1819 novel, The Bride of Lammermoor.
After several promising reefs were found in the area, a five-head battery to crush quartz was installed in 1870, as the town started to boom. By the end of 1871, Ravenswood was The North's first major inland town. The field produced over 200,000 ounces of alluvial gold in the first decade, but reefing was Ravenswood's mainstay. An initial crushing of 450 tons of ore yielded 2,000 ounces of gold. However, as the reefs reached the water table, the ore became increasingly rich in difficult-to-extract sulphides.
The discovery of a more lucrative field in nearby Charters Towers resulted in an exodus in 1872, with the Palmer rush producing a smaller one the following year. Still, Ravenswood survived as a reefing centre and a nearby discovery of silver brought a railway branch line to the town in 1884. In the meantime, Ravenswood had acquired a State School (October 1873), a hospital, a school of arts, and a Catholic church. The town served as the administrative centre for local government in the Ravenswood Division (1879–1903) and Shire of Ravenswood (1903–1930) until its declining population made the existing arrangements unviable. Ravenswood was absorbed into the Dalrymple Shire in January 1930.
Processing gold-bearing ore remained an issue until Charters Towers entrepreneur Archibald Wilson obtained finance for New Ravenswood Limited's cyanide process in 1896. The new technology and some new reefs prompted a modest revival in the first decade of the 20th century. Still, declining ore quality, a 1912 labour dispute, and wartime labour costs saw New Ravenswood collapse in 1917. Still, the eighty years to 1948 had yielded 899,681 ounces of gold, and the late-19th-century revival delivered most of the town's surviving heritage buildings, including the Railway and Imperial Hotels and the 1904 ambulance depot.
Although mining revived briefly during the Depression years, by the 1960s, the population had fallen to around one hundred. However, the town's heritage status, with fourteen sites on the Queensland Heritage Register and a location en route to the Burdekin Dam, constitutes an ongoing drawcard.
Links to asdd:
Burdekin Dam
Cape River goldfield
Charters Towers Regional Council
Dalrymple Shire
Elphinstone Creek
Gugu Badhun
New Ravenswood Limited
Palmer gold rush
Ravenswood Division and Shire
Ravenswood pastoral run
