Croydon
Situated around 400 kilometres west-southwest of Cairns, 496 kilometres north-northwest of Townsville and 402 kilometres northeast of Mount Isa on Takalak country in the Gulf Savannah, the former gold-mining centre of Croydon is the terminus of the Normanton to Croydon railway, which operates the weekly Gulflander tourist train and the administrative centre of the Croydon Shire. The town takes its name from the 5,000 square kilometre pastoral run on Belmore or Station Creek William Chalmers Brown named Croydon Downs after his birthplace in England in the 1880s.
A considerable rush followed when the owners discovered gold on the property in 1885. After four ex-miners, hired to sink a well, found traces of gold and James and Walter Aldridge — Browne's partners in the property — found a quartz leader carrying gold while ringbarking a horse paddock, Browne and the Aldridges took a thorough look at their property and found twenty payable lines of reef before reporting their discovery.
By 1887, Croydon's population had reached 7,000, housed in corrugated iron buildings — including two-storey hotels — and the town was the hub of the newly-established Croydon local government division. It was a reefing field with a very small footprint, with several smaller settlements — Tabletop, True Blue, Golden Gate and Croydon King — within a fifteen-kilometre radius.
Initially, isolation was a serious problem, with a lack of feed for carriage animals during the dry and serious flooding during The Wet. However, the Queensland government had already decided to build a railway from Cloncurry to Normanton, and a 21-kilometre deviation would connect the new settlement to the proposed route. Work began at the Normanton end of the line in 1888; it reached Croydon in 1891, and that's where it ended.
However, by that stage, Croydon was Queensland's second most important goldfield — only Charters Towers produced more gold — and — after Charters Towers and Townsville — North Queensland's third-largest population centre with more than a dozen hotels, shielded from the effects of prolonged droughts and the 1893 bank crash by its mineral wealth.
Production began to decline after 1909, and by the start of the First World War in 1914, the district's population was less than half of its turn-of-the-century high point. Within a decade, gold production had virtually ended. The Mining Warden left in 1926. By 1931, the hotel count was down to three.
Missing links:
Normanton to Croydon railway
Gulflander
Belmore or Station Creek
William Chalmers Brown
Croydon Downs
James and Walter Aldridge
Tabletop
True Blue
Golden Gate
Croydon King
The Dry
The Wet
Cloncurry
Normanton
