From the highway, looking across a landscape that’s dominated by the evaporation pans at the Cheetham Salt Works (1955 postcard here) and the Coke Works you’d possibly be inclined to give the place a miss, which is understandable but means you’ll be passing one of the North’s best kept secrets.
There was, at one point, a tourist information booth (Bowen Salt Cellar) at the Salt Works, which date back to 1925 and stretch across 154 hectares of interconnected ponds where sea water id gradually evaporated to produce a crust of salt crystals up to 150 mm thick that yield around 15,000 tonnes of salt used in stock feed, swimming pools, meat products and processing hides though the set up has been known to 29,000 tonnes.
The substantial black structure behind the salt works is the Bowen Coke Works, operated as a Queensland Government Enterprise from 1932 to 1988, when it was sold to Xstrata Copper. The operation supplies up to 45,000 tonnes of metallurgical coke to Xstrata's Mount Isa Mines, processing coking coal from Collinsville in fifty-four ovens as well as around 9,000 tonnes of coke supplied to other purchasers.
Assuming you’ve decided to avoid the town altogether (your loss), a ninety degree turn will take you past the local aerodrome past the Coral Sea and Catalina Memorial Museum and the Women’s Work Camp (the buildings inside the wire enclosure in the aerodrome grounds) with the turnoff on your right leading towards the Bowen Turf Club at the end of Betzel’s Lane. A little further on the highway meets up with the alternative route out of the town, which passes Bowen State High School, the town’s cemetery and the Col Leather Sporting Complex en route to the point just north of the Big Red Fruit Barn where the two roads merge.
Cross the Don River, pass the road house at the Rio Don and head through Delta between the Shell service station and Bartec Rural Services, avoiding the temptation to turn off and head to the wilds of Mount Dangar or Collinsville, and in a minute or two you’re passing Merinda, the former meatworks township that dates back to 1897.
There’s nothing left on the site of the former meatworks, which were closed in 1997, or the old Merinda State School (relocated away from the highway but here’s the 1909 incarnation) but tucked away behind the BP servo is the Merinda Hotel, where the meat-workers were wont to slake their thirsts. A run down operation that had definitely seen better days has been given a substantial makeover, and now acts as a hotel-motel-work camp complex, accommodating travellers and construction workers employed at the Abbot Point Coal Terminal.
The rail line you pass under on the way out of the township carries coal trains to the port at Abbot Point, and you cross the notoriously flood-prone Sandy Gully on the way towards Euri Creek, with roads along both banks of the creek leading to extensive farming operations, East Euri running along what you might be inclined to think of as the southern bank until you realise you’re actually heading west at this point, and West Euri on the other side. From there the highway snakes between Mount Little (on the right, with Abbot Point beyond) and Mount Pring, which gives its name to the rail depot outside Merinda, before the turn off to Abbot Point and what is supposed to be the State Development Area.
Pass Salisbury Plains with Mount Roundback on the left, and the road meanders along in a northwesterly direction, across the overhead rail bridge that replaced the notorious level crossing at Wilmington and on past Good Fortune Bay aquaculture project at Saltwater Creek and on to Guthalungra on the Elliot River, where there’s a turn off that’ll take you to Cape Upstart, another one of the local-friendly hideaways scattered along the coastline.
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