Charters Towers
Located around 135 kilometres southwest of Townsville to the east of Gudjal country, Charters Towers was formerly Queensland's second-largest population centre. During its heyday between 1872 and 1899, Charters Towers had its own stock exchange and a population of around thirty thousand.
Originally named Charters Tors after mining warden W. S. E. M. Charters and the granite formations on what later became known as Towers Hill, the town was founded after twelve-year-old Aboriginal boy Jupiter Mosman found gold on Christmas Eve 1871 while looking for horses spooked by a lightning strike. While the Towers began as an alluvial field, ten major gold reefs in the area made Charters Towers Australia's richest goldfield, producing over 200 tonnes of gold between 1871 and 1917 from underground reefs with an average yield of 34 grams per tonne crushed — almost double the yield from Victorian mines and almost 75% higher than Western Australia's Kalgoorlie field.
The 20th century saw mining become increasingly uneconomical as ventilation and water problems pushed production costs higher, and a fixed gold price eroded profitability. Although the town entered a long period of relative stagnation, it survived as a regional centre for the mining industry, the beef industry, and education, with boarding schools catering for students from remote areas of western Queensland, the Northern Territory, Cape York Peninsula, and the islands in Torres Strait.
However, mining revived after 20th-century technology made them viable again, and the mullock heaps that once characterised the city disappeared.
The Goldfield Ashes cricket carnival, held on the Australia Day long weekend in late January, is the Southern Hemisphere's largest cricket carnival. In recent years, it has attracted almost two hundred teams.
Links to add:
W. S. E. M. Charters
Towers Hill
Jupiter Mosman
Goldfield Ashes
