Town establishment
Burketown, or "Burke Town", was named in honour of explorer Robert O'Hara Burke, who died shortly after making the first recorded successful south-north crossing of the continent in 1860-1. [16] [17] The first European settlers arrived in the local region not long after Burke and partner William John Wills' expedition. By the mid-1860s, several cattle stations - including Gregory Downs, Floraville, and Donors Hill - had been founded inland from the present site of Burketown. Burketown was formally established in 1865 by Robert Towns, chiefly to serve as a port and supply centre for his extensive properties in the Gulf country. Towns chartered a small vessel the Jacmel Packet and on 12 June 1865 it arrived off the mouth of the Albert River. The goods were eventually landed on the present site of Burketown. [18] Towns, a prominent Sydney pastoralist and financier, also established Townsville in the same year.
By September 1865 the population was about 40 and by October a store and a hotel were under construction, the balance of buildings were humpies. Rations and grog were plentiful but already one evil was noted: prices for goods were so high that some intended settlers could not stay. The town grew; however currency, both notes and coins, were so short in early Burketown that the business people issued their own currency, dubbed "shinplaster" or "calabashers". These were in the form of IOU's hand printed on tissue paper so that they had as short a life as possible. In February 1866 Lieutenant Wentworth D'Arcy UHR with 8 troopers and accompanied by William Landsborough, the first Police Magistrate, rode into Burketown where everyone carried a pistol and where a successful shop keeper could ride well, shoot well and be an able pugilist. The pioneer spirit was indomitable and the first official race meeting was held 25 July 1866 with prize money at $200 (sic). In October 1868 Towns and Co traded wool, tallow, hides and skins between Sweers Island and Batavia. [19]
Burketown Post Office opened on 1 July 1866, closed in 1871 and reopened in 1883. [20]
In the same year, settlement of the region heavily impacted upon the sovereign Indigenous peoples. With their lands stolen and hunting grounds denied, local Aboriginal peoples hunted the horses of the settlers. Retribution by the settlers was enacted under Sub Inspector Uhr and was assisted by the arrival of the Queensland Native Police. A massacre of 30 Aboriginal people took place after 12 horses were killed. A further 29 Aboriginal people were murdered shortly afterwards by shooting and bludgeoning. As the Burketown correspondent of the Port Dennison Times reported on 4 June 1868, "everybody in the district is delighted with the wholesale slaughter dealt out by the native police". The newspaper paid "thanks" to those involved in "ridding the district of fifty-nine (59) myalls" or local Aboriginal people. [21]
Burketown was used by explorer Francis Cadell as a staging point for refitting and refuelling the steamer Eagle and collecting mail and fresh supplies during his 1867–68 survey of the Northern Territory coastline. [22]
At first, hopes the town would develop into a major settlement in north-western Queensland were high. However, from 1866 tropical diseases ravaged the population. The vessel "Margaret and Mary" from Sydney came into port rife with "Gulf Fever" (never properly identified, but thought to be either malaria or typhoid). Estimates of the numbers who died vary from 25 to 100 people. The majority of the crew and passengers of ship including the captain's wife died. Many of the dead were buried in a mass grave in Burketown Cemetery. [23] Landsborough evacuated the survivors to Sweers Island for a period of 18 months, where a further two died and were buried on the island. [19]
At the first land sales in the town on 14 August 1867, 75 allotments were sold.
The town was devastated by a tropical cyclone on 5 March 1887 which flooded almost all of Burketown. Only the highest part of town, near where the Council Office is currently located, escaped the waters from the Gulf of Carpentaria. A copy of a 1918 report to the Queensland Parliament from the Department of Harbours and Rivers Engineers refers to the sea rising to 5.5 metres above the highest spring tide level at the Albert River Heads. This level is about 8 metres above Australian Height Datum. Seven people of the population of 138 died in the cyclone. [24] [25]
Burketown State School opened on 26 April 1888. [26]
Large numbers of Chinese men and others from a wide variety of backgrounds also came to the Gulf Country after colonisation. The came to northern Australia following the discovery of gold around the Palmer River in northeast Queensland and at Pine Creek in the Northern Territory in the 1870s. By the late nineteenth century, it is estimated that Chinese people outnumbered those of European ancestry north of the tropic of Capricorn. Chinese migration into Queensland’s Gulf Country probably peaked in the early 1890s, just before the institution of the Chinese Immigration Restriction Act 1891 (Qld). This law aimed to prevent the arrival of Chinese through the introduction of a £10 poll tax—an amount equivalent to six months’ wages for an average worker at the time.
For a Chinese person to legally emigrate from the Northern Territory to Queensland in this period, it would have cost this tax in addition to the cost of a steamer from Darwin to Townsville, which was £5 in 1898—a prohibitive expense. To avoid this cost, many Chinese attempted to walk overland to Queensland, mostly following the coastal track through the southern Gulf Country that Leichhardt pioneered in the 1840s. This route, some 1780 kilometres from Darwin to Burketown, is estimated to have taken about three months to traverse. Many of those who attempted it were arrested as soon as they arrived in Queensland, near Burketown and kept in the Burketown Gaol for a time. However, others managed to evade arrest and remain in the Gulf Country at this time, and for a long time thereafter, coming to live on the fringes of Burketown at Woods Lake and Hookeys Lagoon, as well as on stations and around mines. While living separately from other Australians, many of these men became close to Aboriginal people, conceiving children with Aboriginal wives and many people in the area today have Chinese heritage. [27]
Records show that Woods Lake with its excellent water supply was then the site of a flourishing market garden, where the Chinese skills in vegetable production were well employed. This source of fresh food was very important in countering scurvy, the scourge of remote places as well as ships at sea. The garden supplied Burketown and exported some produce to Thursday Island. No details are known of the names of the producers or of the volume of their export trade, but it seems likely that they could have been associated with the two Chinese, Lee Gee and Jimmy Ah Fin who were the local bakers in Burketown at the time. [28]
The Burketown Hotel, established in 1920 in a building originally used as the customs bond store, was destroyed by fire in 2012. The Albert Hotel building, originally the Burketown customs house is believed to date from the 1860s. Another famous Burketown Hotel, the Commonwealth, was built in around 1926, but was also destroyed by fire in 1954. [13]
