Charleville - Culture and History

The area around Charleville was first explored by Edmund Kennedy during his 1847 journey through the area. At the time he was trying to solve the riddle of the rivers. His expedition succeeded in establishing that the waterways in Central Queensland, particularly the Barcoo, which Thomas Mitchell had called the 'Victoria', flowed south into the Channel country rather than north into the Gulf of Carpentaria. During this expedition Kennedy passed within 10 km of the present site of Charleville.

By the 1860s the area was being settled and as early as 1866 a pub and a general store had appeared on the site of modern-day Charleville.

In 1868 William Alcock Tully, the then Queensland under-secretary for public lands and chief commissioner for crown lands, surveyed the town and named it after his boyhood home in County Cork, Ireland. The name had originally come from France.

By 1888, when the population had grown to 1470, it was a thriving centre with a number of hotels, a brewery, a cordial factory, four sawmills and three butcheries.

Prior to the arrival of the railway in 1888 (and even until the early 1900s) as many as 500 bullock teams passed through each year, carrying woolclip to the railhead at Roma.

The location of the town at a permanent waterhole meant that it was on major stock routes through the area. By the 1880s it had become an important stopover point for Cobb & Co who established a major coach building factory in the town in 1893. It employed over 40 people (blacksmiths, wheelwrights, trimmers, painters and coach builders) and a sawmill was built to cater specifically for the timber needs of the factory. It was closed down in 1920.

In the 1920s the town was at the forefront of the country's infant aviation industry. On 2 November 1922 the first regular Qantas service took off from Charleville with a 400-pound payload and 160 letters. It was bound for Cloncurry.

Today these links with transportation are still important. The town is home to both the southern Queensland base of the Royal Flying Doctor Service and the School of Distance Education.