Burdell  Burke  Bushland Beach

Burdell 

Residential suburb of Townsville adjoining Deeragun, named after the family who built the Bohlevale homestead (c1910), west of the Bohle River and gifted land for the Bohlevale State primary school in 1911. The suburb was named and gazetted in 1991. After the Thuringowa City Council approved the first stage of the Stockland Waterway Gardens residential development in 2007, with 4200 house sites to be developed over thirty years the Council set out to develop the Northern Beaches Leisure Centre (3 pools and aquatic recreation) and the Catholic Church announced its intention to open a P-7 school in 2011. The Northern Beaches State High School (1997) is a few kilometres west in Deeragun.

Burke 

Electorate was originally a single member electorate when created under the 1872 Electoral Districts Ac. It was a two member constituency from 1888 to 1892 when it was divided into two electorates - Burke and Croydon. Amalgamated in the 1931 redistribution into Carpentaria, the electorate was revived in the 1959 redistribution, with the name changed to Mount Isa in 1971.

Burketown 

Remote town, the administrative centre of the Burke Shire Council, around 30 kilometres from the coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria and named in honour of explorer Robert O'Hara Burke. The town sits close to the the east-west dividing line between the salt flats and wetlands to the north and the beginning of the flat savannah grass plains (Plains of Promise) to the south. The first European settlers arrived in the region shortly after Burke and Wills' expedition to the Gulf of Carpentaria, and by the mid 1860s, several cattle stations, including Gregory Downs, Floraville and Beames Brook had been founded.  

Towns and Company chartered the Jacmel Packet which arrived off the mouth of the Albert River on 12 June, 1865 with a cargo of supplies for the pastoral runs in the area. stations landed it arrived. Burketown developed around a site on the Albert River where the supplies were landed. 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 prices were high. Currency, both notes and coins, were so short in early Burketown that business people issued their own currency, dubbed shinplaster or calabashers, IOU's hand printed on tissue paper so that they had as short a life as possible.  A small boiling down works provided a limited market for Gulf cattlemen, and a second was erected in 1867. Hopes the town would develop into a major settlement in north-western Queensland were high, but tropical diseases ravaged the population in 1866 and the town was hit by a cyclone in 1887.

Burketown Mineral Field was declared in 1899 in an attempt to promote development, and while a tramway from the Mineral Field to Burketown was often proposed it was never actually achieved. Production on the field peaked three times: at the turn of the 19th century, from 1914 to 1927, and from 1948 to 1970 but attempts at mining were largely defeated by the cost of transporting ore to port facilities.

Burketown is believed to be the basis of Willstown, the town referred to in the title of A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute. 

Bushland Beach

Residential suburb of Townsville, overlooking Halifax Bay 16 km north-west of central Townsville.


© Ian Hughes 2013