Mundubbera - Culture and History

The Mundubbera area was first settled by Europeans in the late 1840s. In 1848 Mundubbera Station was established as a sheep grazing property and the following year the Archer brothers, who were to become some of the largest landholders in Central Queensland, moved into the area.

Cattle largely replaced sheep as the major economic focus in the 1880s as the local speargrass had an adverse effect on the fleece. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the land was resumed by the government and opened up for closer settlement. As a result the town came into existence in the years immediately preceding World War I. The school was opened in 1913, the railway from Brisbane arrived the following year, the steam-driven butter factory was opened in 1916 and the post office and hospital were established in 1920 and 1921 respectively.

The area's main industry, citrus fruit, was established in nearby Gayndah as early as 1892 but it wasn't until 1933 that a local dairy farmer named Henry Zipf started growing citrus fruit on his property. By the 1980s the town was responsible for nearly all of Australia's mandarin exports.

There is, typically, some confusion about the Aboriginal origins of the town's name. It is possible, if enigmatic, that it means 'footstep', though others claim, no less cryptically, that it refers to the steps cut to climb trees. There is another theory which asserts that 'mendi burra' were the words used to describe the boundary between the lands of two local Aboriginal groupings.