Cardwell
Located in Wargamaygan country on a long narrow coastal strip on the shores of Rockingham Bay 138 kilometres northwest of Townsville and 153 kilometres south of Cairns, Cardwell was a remote and isolated site when George Elphinstone Dalrymple chose it as the location for a port to serve the newly established Valley of Lagoons pastoral station.
A marine survey party had assessed the area in 1862, Dalrymple had made an unsuccessful attempt to reach the coast from the Valley of Lagoons the following year. The twenty-man party that arrived at Rockingham Bay in January 1864 aboard the schooner Policeman, with the three-ton cutter Heather Bell in tow, included Dalrymple, James Morrill, the North Kennedy District's Commissioner for Crown Lands William Alcock Tully, Phillip Sellheim, botanist John Dallachy, Arthur Jervoise Scott, co-owner of the Valley of Lagoons and Native Mounted Police Lieut. Marlow of the Native Police.
Queensland Governor Sir George Bowen named the settlement that developed after Dalrymple blazed a trail from coast to the Valley of Lagoons after Edward Cardwell, Secretary of State for Colonies.
However, despite Dalrymple's best efforts and official government enthusiasm for the port, limited access to the hinterland across a steep coastal range through dense rain forest allowed Townsville, established the same year in a more accessible location, to gain an immediate advantage that it never lost.
Still, although the settlement never prospered, and was almost deserted by the late 1860s - a cyclone flattened the settlement on 2 March 1867 — Cardwell benefited from the gold rushes to the Etheridge, Gilbert and Einasleigh goldfields in the early seventies — 184,265 ounces of gold from the Etheridge went out through Cardwell between 1872 and 1875 — and had acquired a post office (1864), a Provisional School (1870), a telegraph line designed to connect the rest of Queensland with the Gulf country and, from there, overseas (1872) a jetty (1875) and served as the region's local government hub after 1879.
Cardwell remained the administrative seat of the former Cardwell Shire until it was merged with the Johnstone Shire to form the Cassowary Coast Region in 2008.
