If you had the inclination and a historical bent, you could continue along Ross River Road, eventually reaching the site of the present dam. That used to be the main Charters Towers Road, crossing the Ross up towards the headwaters before the bridge at the end of Bowen Road took the Towers traffic along a more direct route.
That was probably the explanation for something that had me scratching my head ten or twelve years down the track when the Queensland Education Office Gazette published a list detailing the dates on which the various schools around the state commenced taking enrolments.
Townsville Central was, I knew, the oldest school in Townsville, but as I checked through the list, I was flabbergasted to learn that the second oldest of the schools still operating in Townsville was the school at The Weir, dating back to 1881, comfortably ahead of more likely suspects in Townsville South (1884), Townsville West (1887) and the relatively recent Hermit Park (1924).
On the way, of course, you’d have passed the Aboriginal Reserve, which is still a substantial twenty-two hectare yellow feature on the current street directory.
There’s every chance that the label only features on the street map because that’s the way it has been labelled since they started including that section of Townsville in the directory and no one managed to get around to changing the label, but the contemporary reader might be scratching his or her head and wondering why there is still a substantial block of land labelled Aboriginal Reserve sitting plumb in what’s probably within cooee of Townsville’s demographic centre.
The answer, of course, in terms of When I come here this was all bush lies in the fact that fifty years ago we were talking the very edge of the urban area.
For much of the preceding couple of decades this block of land with a cluster of buildings in the middle was comfortably out of sight of the general populace and, consequently, totally out of mind.
Still, and this is a concept some readers might have difficulty getting their heads around that Reserve would have provided the only contact between most of the residents of Townsville and Indigenous Australia.
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