A Sense of Place – Hughenden, explores a town with a proud pioneering history. Situated in North West Queensland this town has a long attachment to outback life and to the building of the cattle industry in Queensland. Situated two and a half hours ride west of Charters Towers the town exudes the feeling of the outback and what it means to be Australian.
The country changes slowly as you move west of the Great Dividing Range. Trees thin out, the ground hardens, and the distances seem endless. After a restless night beside the road, I was glad to be moving again, riding through open eucalypt country and small towns that seem to exist in the gaps between places, defined by a pub, a petrol bowser, and a long memory of trains and cattle.
There’s a familiarity to this part of Queensland. It carries a sense of work and endurance rather than spectacle. Life here has always been shaped by climate, by distance, and by the need to make things function with whatever is available.
Outback Travel
Approaching Hughenden, the land flattens and dries. A wind farm rises from the plains, its slow-turning blades casting long shadows across the dust. Tiredness and imagination combine, and for a moment the machines feel out of place in this ancient land, reminders that even in the timelessness of the outback, the present keeps arriving.
Hughenden sits beside the Flinders River, a wide, sandy channel that only occasionally carries water. For much of the year, it appears empty, though it quietly holds the reason the town exists at all. Windmills once drew water from below the surface, allowing cattle and people to remain where the climate otherwise might not have permitted it. One still stands, a marker of a time past, rather than prosperity.
This country has a much longer story. Long before roads, railways, or cattle, it was home to the Yirendali people, whose connection to this land extends back thousands of years. That history is not immediately visible, but it remains present, beneath the town, the riverbed, and the names on maps.
A timeless place
Late in the afternoon, I sat near the edge of the riverbed, watching the light shift as the sun lowered. I try and think back to when this place was on the edge of a giant inland sea, with dinosaurs and strange shallow sea creatures. Long before we walked the planet, their foscils are found across the region, a reminder they existed. Today, the relatives of those ancient creatures are the birds, they gathered briefly at the remaining waterholes before lifting away into the trees. The air cooled just enough to be noticed. A vehicle passed on the highway, then the road fell quiet again.
Hughenden doesn’t announce itself. It occupies a long pause in the landscape, steady, patient, waiting to be understood rather than explained.
Getting there
Drive four hours west from Townsville, two and a half hours past Charters Towers. Continue over the Great Dividing Range and down into the grass plains. The area first came to the attention of graziers when Earnest Henry drove cattle from Bowen. European history goes back to 1867 while its Aboriginal history is thousands of years in the making.
This reflection forms part of an ongoing Sense of Place series exploring regional Australia. Expanded versions of these stories are collected in my books.
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