Aussie Towns

23/12/2024

A Merry Christmas to everyone who is patiently waiting for my back to return to normal. It will happen. In the meantime this is my favourite Christmas joke.
Have a great and happy holiday.

18/12/2024

A Quick Update ... and a small addition
Well I am now into the fourth week of lying on my back and doing nothing other than reading ... very pleasant way to spend the days. I am slowly getting better but it will still be a few weeks before I return to writing this FB page. Slowly slowly. The pain is still there and the drugs are working.
For those who want to learn a little bit more about the creator of Aussie Towns I recently contributed to a travel blog titled "Don't Forget Your Toothbrush". I hope it is interesting. I don't listen to myself so you will have to tell me whether it was worthwhile. It can be accessed at

Listen to Bruce Elder from Don't Forget Your Toothbrush. What do Paul McCartney, Kiama, and Jesse Windows have in common? Bruce Elder!Bruce has done it all. From working for Rolling Stone magazine, to creating the Aussie Towns website, Bruce has spent a lifetime immersed in storytelling, travel, and...

05/12/2024

An Update ... for anyone who is interested in reading about pain

About a week ago I was in such pain I could not get out of bed. I ended up being taken, by ambulance, to Wollongong Hospital where it was determined that I had multiple fractures (T12-L3 compression fractures - Osteoperotic compression fractures - for those who understand such things) of my spine. Since then I have been on a powerful regime of painkillers (most notably Targin), spending most of my time on my back, unable to get downstairs to my computer (the laptop is no substitute and my concentration is only good for about 15 minutes) and generally feeling rather useless. My doctor referred me through to the local Osteoperosis specialist unit where ... wait for it ... they told me I was 180th on the list. When we suggested that private treatment might be quicker we were referred to an endocrinologist who could see me next June. Such are the joys. I am somewhat heartened to learn that the waiting list for elective surgery in the UK is now 6.3 million people. Makes 180 in Wollongong seem like a bullet train. Anyway, if my very very slow progress is anything to go by, I reckon this page will be back in action before Christmas. Just lots more sleeping and reading. I am on the mend ... and I am having a love affair with Panadol and Targin.
Oh, yes, and thanks so much for all those kind messages. It is so wonderful hearing from readers and so heartening to know that people read and enjoy this FB page. Thanks over and over again.

21/11/2024

Morning everyone. This page is going to take a break for a few days. Yesterday, after four painful weeks of back pain, I had an MRI scan which revealed I have multiple fractures of my lower spine. Such are the joys of old age. I am happily sitting in Wollongong Hospital and learning about the mysteries of managing pain. See everyone soon. I will be back.
Bruce

20/11/2024

When Humpty Doo was the best joke in Australia

Since Europeans explored the northern quarter of Australia – particularly the area now known as the Northern Territory – there has been an enduring fantasy that it should be the food bowl on the nation.

“Look at the soils! Look at the rainfall! Look at the tropical richness! Anything and everything should grow here,” the politicians cry.

What they forget is the diseases, the insects, the wild animals, the body sapping temperatures during the wet, the incredible levels of flooding rainfall, the cyclones … and on and on.

When I was a teenager Humpty Doo was a byword for political stupidity. It was one of the great economic disasters and the disaster had been created, as always, by optimists who didn’t see the “unintended consequences” of their wild-eyed dreaming.

As early as the 1870s a German botanist, Dr. Maurice Holtze, had carried out experiments in Darwin. He believed that the future of the Northern Territory lay in its ability to grow tropical crops. Holtze had experimented with everything from rubber to sugar and rice.

The goldrushes to the Northern Territory (Pine Creek in particular) in the 1880s had brought an influx of Chinese miners and the area around Humpty Doo had been used to grow rice to satisfy this demand. The rice had grown without too many problems but there had been no further interest.

Then, in 1954, after considerable scientific experimentation by the CSIRO, a joint Australia-US company known as Territory Rice Ltd was established. The plan was to irrigate the plain of the Adelaide River and produce a commercial rice crop. The theory looked good. It was so good then even built a dam. The reality was a total disaster.

In 1955-56 Territory Rice Ltd received agricultural leases over 303,000 hectares of land on the floodplain. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
Wild buffaloes moved in and started destroying the paddies and eating the crops. Rats appeared and wrought havoc. The birds consumed the seeds as quickly as the company could plant them. The soil proved to be too saline and the drainage was inadequate. Add to all these problems the weakness of the management of the project and by 1959 the paddy fields had been abandoned. The management could find no one else to take over the leases so by 1962 they forfeited their land to the government.

It was the same story with the Ord River Scheme. The north was never going to succumb to “get rich quick” schemes. Today it is agriculturally viable and fresh produce is exported to south-east Asia. It only took 60 years!

If you are visiting Kakadu make sure you stop at Humpty Doo and shed a tear from an experiment full of wild-eyed enthusiasm which was initially defeated by the forces of nature. Check out

Humpty Doo, with a population of over 5,000 and a location only 38 km from the centre of Darwin, has effectively become a commuter town on the road to Kakadu National Park. Once known for its attempt to turn the tropical north into a verdant garden for fruit and vegetables, it is now is a combinatio...

19/11/2024

When A Town Only Has One Historic Building – Port Douglas

If you want to understand what a real North Queensland cyclone is like and what it can do, consider Port Douglas.

In 1903 the Australian Handbook wrote of Port Douglas that it had a population of 494 and that the buildings, mostly along Macrossan Street, included the Exchange Hotel, the Court House Hotel, the North Australian Hotel, Caledonian Hotel, Queens Hotel, Mossman Hotel, O’Brien’s Hotel, Royal Hotel and Mt Pleasant Hotel.

As well “There are here a Customs House, money order office, post and telegraph, police station, pilot’s residence, Court House, Lands Office, Government Bond Store, Roman Catholic church, Church of England, Queensland National Bank, Government Savings Bank, Primary school, School of Arts, Hospital with 30 beds, Masonic and Oddfellows lodges.”

If they were all standing, that would be an impressive run of historic buildings BUT there was a huge cyclone in 1911 and today … wait for it … there is only one building of historic interest left in the town.

The cyclone decimated the town and the changing nature of the economy finished the job: everything slowly moved to Mossman because Port Douglas was ruined.

It is no small irony that the one building in town which still stands and dates from the 19th century is the timber Court House which the Queensland Historic Register records as “one the few surviving pre-1880s timber buildings in North Queensland, as the oldest building in Port Douglas and the second oldest timber court house in Queensland.”

Today the highlight of the town (if you can call it a highlight?) is the Sheridan Grand Mirage Resort (a combination of 300 hotel beds, 80 condominiums and a particularly lavish golf course all on 2.5 km of the main beach) which was built in the 1980s by one of the country’s most infamous business crooks, Christopher Skase.

It is a holiday resort town and in the winter months it is packed with holidaymakers and people eager to reach the Outer Barrier Reef. In summer it is not so popular … there is always the chance of another devastating cyclone.

Check out

Port Douglas is primarily a popular holiday destination (an upmarket alternative to Cairns characterised by a proliferation of resorts) which offers a wide range of activities including trips out to the Great Barrier Reef's Outer Reef (often the vessels go to both Port Douglas and Cairns before head...

18/11/2024

When A Town Gets Rich By Surprise – Bega

The Bega Pioneer Museum, which is run by the Bega Valley Historical Society, is located in the old Family Hotel (built in 1858-9) at 87 Bega Street.

It is a typical rural museum full of unusual memorabilia covering the industrial, military, transport and domestic history of the town. Museums like it remind me of the famous Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. They are full of exotic oddments that have been thrown together in a rather haphazard way. The visitor needs to mooch and be surprised.

There are two highlights. The first is a remarkable collection of 19th century photographs of the town’s pioneers. Funny crusty old codgers with mutton chops and bushy beards looking suitably wooden as they stand like statues for the very slow exposures needed for cameras at the time.

The other, and it is really the museum’s strange and very lucrative highlight, is an old horse-drawn ambulance which was subsequently converted into a hawker’s van. There is nothing special about it – except for the remarkable discovery when it arrived at the museum.

The locals love to tell the story of the discovery of literally thousands of old £10 notes hidden in secret wall cavities in the van. The money was only discovered after the van had been bequeathed to the museum. At the time it was being cleaned up for display.
The hawker, George Trad, it seems, was a living oxymoron. He had died a very wealthy pauper. Quite accidentally he became a major contributor to the museum.

There is a detailed history of Trad and his Hawker’s Van which notes: “While he was ill in the late 1950s and staying with the Lucas family, Bega Museum staff say Trad would visit his van now and then. He was obviously in decline and they spoke of his distress of not being able to locate cash that he said was in the van although he and his friends searched it many times. People doubted there was ever any hidden cash. George was adamant that he had hidden cash in the van and in a rash moment, accused his carers of stealing it.”
“In April 2002, a panel of religious pictures that was attached to the front interior wall of the van was removed for cleaning an maintenance. Packed behind the panel were 8 to***co tins. In the tins were wads of £10 notes, many of them rust-stained from the tins. They had been in the van as George had claimed, undisturbed for about 40 years.”

For more information about Bega, check out

When it comes to good old Aussie cheese, few names resonate quite as strongly as Bega and the nearby cheese-making towns of Kameruka and Bodalla. Today Bega Cheese employs more than 600 people, has absorbed the old dairy cooperatives at Kameruka, Bodalla and Tilba and produces more than 40,000 tonne...

17/11/2024

When A Town Dies – Tintaldra, VIC

By accident I arrived in Tintaldra at a time when it was in its death throes. It had outlived its usefulness was down to a single shop and a couple of houses.

The story is interesting. Tintaldra was created by one man – the implausibly named Sydney Grandison Watson – who, by the early 1860s owned 12,000 acres, on the edge of the Snowy Mountains, which he called Tintaldra.

Watson decided that he needed a shop on his property and he had a carpenter named Edwin Jephcott build a store from columns of red gum which supported redgum beams, redgum rafters and wooden shingles which were brought from the appropriately named, Shingle Creek. The walls were vertical slats of red stringybark.

It initially operated as a store for the workers on Tintaldra and for the gold miners who, having given up on finding gold, were wandering through the area looking for land to farm.

The store was enough to create a small town. A German named Christian Vogel arrived and set up a punt across the Murray River. He was also adept as a blacksmith and wheelwright and amusingly, at least for a blacksmith, also worked as a dentist. Not a pleasant thought. Does an anvil have a function in a dentist’s surgery?

By the mid-1860s the store was operating as a post office. A postmaster was employed at £15 a year and the post was brought by horse 456 km from Melbourne twice weekly.

By the 1870s supplies, which were brought by bullock dray from either Wodonga or Gundagai (it took three weeks), had been stockpiled and it was estimated that the store held £7,000 worth of goods.

Tintaldra even operated as a Customs Post until Federation in 1901.

So what happened? Nothing more serious than: times change.

A few years ago the General Store offered meals and afternoon tea. It had an impressive little museum and the redgum structure was beautifully maintained. The pub, the Tintaldra Hotel, was doing reasonable business – particularly weekend sightseers.

Then the people at the hotel tried to sell it. No one was interested. It closed with little prospect of new tenants. And the General Store, visited by few people, divested itself of its “museum” articles.

Sad. But that is the nature of any town that doesn’t have a meaningful raison d’etre … and today Tintaldra is nothing more than a peaceful hamlet beside the Murray River.

Tintaldra is an important historic village which lies beneath the Snowy Mountains. It is located on the southern banks of the Murray River which forms the border between New South Wales and Victoria. In 2017 it was very close to dying. The local hotel, which dates from 1864, was closed and up for sa...

16/11/2024

Wheat Lumpers – A Forgotten Race of Supermen

In my youth, back in the mid-1960s, I worked in a factory in Sydney’s Western Suburbs. At the time Lidcombe, now almost an inner suburb, was seen as an outer western suburb. Anything beyond Strathfield was the wilds beyond the city centre.

My boss was a giant of a man named Ozzie Williamson. He was a bit of a crook – always on the take, doing shifty deals with unscrupulous trucking agents (he took the cut – I took the blame), drinking too much, smooth talking the truck drivers and generally strutting around like John Wayne. He was in charge of transport. I was the Despatch Clerk.

In his youth Ozzie had been a wheat lumper. He had been one of those supermen who loaded and unloaded 80-85 kg bags of wheat. This was before the arrival of bulk loading.

It was an horrendous job. The wheat would arrive from the farms and have to be unloaded and stored in some accessible public place. This meant lifting the bags of wheat down from the truck or wagon tray and stacking them in piles which reached up to 26 bags high.

Then the bags had to be loaded onto some sort of train to be carried to the ports where, in turn, they were unloaded onto the wharf and loaded into the holds of the clipper ships which took them to Europe.

Such a job would have killed a lesser man but Ozzie was a giant and he looked as though, even though he would have been in his fifties, he could still carry a bag of wheat.

In fact, and here is a rare piece of forgotten folklore, at the weekend Ozzie would race with a bag of wheat over his shoulders. At half time during Rugby League matches he would race the fastest man on the team.

The race was simple. The true rugby sprinter would start at the end of the football field. Ozzie, with a bag of wheat over his shoulders, would start at the halfway mark. The sprinter would try and catch Ozzie. They never did. He could still run 50 yards with 80 kg of wheat on his shoulders in less than 10 seconds and none of the rugby sprinters could match that over 100 yards.

Port Wakefield was one of the ports where wheat was shipped to Europe. If you want to understand what the shipping on the Yorke Peninsula in South Australia was like – check out

Although it is now a small quiet town on the Yorke Peninsula, Port Victoria is one of the most romantic and historically important settlements in South Australia. The town calls itself 'the last of the windjammer ports' and it is this romantic connection with the age of sail and the great clipper sh...

15/11/2024

Whatever happened to Mareeba’s To***co Industry?

The volcanic soils of the Atherton Tablelands, combined with the heavy and reliable tropical rainfall, mean that a clever farmer can grow virtually anything.

I was reminded when I wrote up Mareeba. When I went to this town, which fancies itself as the “Capital of Cape York”, some 30 years ago, it was surrounded by to***co. It was the to***co capital of Australia, and the rich, red, volcanic soils were ideal for growing the “filthy weed”.

In fact, to***co was a $50 million industry with 150 farmers on the Atherton Tablelands growing the crop until 2003 when it all abruptly stopped.

I knew the industry was dead when, back in 2017, I visited the town and noticed, in the main street, the To***co Leaf Marketing Board building was for lease and the next door establishment, the North Queensland To***co Growers Co-operative, now known simply as North Queensland TGT, had become a hardware and agricultural company selling dog food, livestock handling equipment, fertilisers, fruit and vegetable packing and tomato seeds, pumpkin seeds and mango grading machines.

No one can say the local to***co farmers weren’t enterprising when demand for their favoured crop collapsed. Given the soils and the rains they tried their hands at … green eating mangoes, lychees, longans, coffee, limes, peaches, paw paws, custard apples, navy beans, avocados, pumpkins, cabbages, watermelons, corn, peanuts, sugar cane, table grapes … it is that volcanic soil and good rainfall.

By 2020 there were over 30 crops grown in the area – it the area was producing over 70% of Australia’s coffee – and the total income for the farmers was around $180 million.

It is a model lesson – and one that could be learned by coal miners – that when the bottom drops out of a market (and it certainly did for to***co back in 2003) those who think creatively and laterally can actually do much better than those who whinge and cling onto their old habits.

Mareeba, an important regional service centre, is the largest town on the Atherton Tablelands. It lies at the heart of the tableland's agricultural activities and is surrounded by coffee plantations, mango and paw paw farms, avocado farms, macadamia nut plantations as well as sugar cane fields and o...

14/11/2024

What’s in a name? The naming of Emerald in Queensland and Victoria

You would think that the explanation for why a town in named “Emerald” would be easy.
The area must have … well … emeralds and therefore the name is appropriate and self-evident.

Well, not quite. In the case of Emerald in Queensland, where the town really was surrounded by “the largest sapphire fields in the world” you would think that the name was appropriate but that would be to forget the importance of “emerald” as a colour.

Looking out across the land (obviously in a very good year), the pastoralist and politician, Peter Fitzallan Macdonald, who had been born in Campbelltown in 1830 and by the 1850s was buying up vast swathes of central Queensland, named his property “Emerald” because he was impressed by the greenness of the pastures.

So, Emerald because of Emerald Green not because of gem stones.

And when I was putting the finishing touches on Emerald in Victoria I came across the fact that the settlement came into existence because gold was discovered in the area, I thought, well this must surely be a town named after the precious metals in the area. Oh, and add to that, the next town to the west is called Gembrook. Obvious, eh!

The story is one of the most unusual when it comes to the gold discoveries in Victoria. Instead of tens of thousands of miners rushing to the area when gold was discovered it was never more than a dribble of optimistic diggers.

In 1851 a party, known only as the "Lucky Germans", returned from the Emerald area to Melbourne where they cashed in gold to the approximate value of £2,000 before returning to their homeland. They were a rare example of sensible gold prospectors. Having hit the jackpot, they walked away.

On the 14 October, 1851, the Melbourne Herald newspaper reported that the “Lucky Germans” had found their gold at the junction of Menzies Creek and Woori Yallock Creek, which is in the Butterfield Reserve, adjacent to what is now known as the Emerald Diggings Picnic Ground.

Now here’s the strange bit. The goldfield at Emerald only ever attracted solitary miners. There was no rush. One of those diggers was an Irishman named Jack ‘Parson’ Emerald … can you see where this is leading … and the creek and the town were named after him. Not, as you would suspect, because he found a fortune in the area but because he was found dead (obviously murdered) in his hut. He had been shot through the heart. The crime was never solved.

Is Emerald in Victoria the only town (certainly I know of no others in Australia) named after a murder victim?

Check out Emerald in Victoria at

Today Emerald is a south-eastern suburb of Greater Melbourne. Lying at an altitude of 318 metres, it sits on a ridge overlooking Emerald Lake and the Cardinia Reservoir. It is a town with some interesting historic firsts - it was the first town to develop in the Dandenongs; it was a town where the C...

13/11/2024

What would we do without the collective intelligence of the internet? Khancoban

This is what serendipity looks like. A few years ago I had two (not one but two - totally disconnected) people write to me about Khancoban, a beautiful town on the edge of the Snowy Mountains.

I suspect they both stumbled upon Khancoban because of cold and snowy weather at the time.

Anyway, they reached Aussie Towns and read – under the heading “Origin of Name” - The area was originally known as Swampy Plain. In 1876 a post office was opened in the tiny settlement and it was known as Khancoban. There has been much debate over the name which seems to mix the Middle Eastern-Indian subcontinent word "khan" with the unknown "cobin". The most plausible explanation is that "the run, Khancoban, was first taken up by William Guise in 1838. In 1848 it was held by Captain Grant and Captain Trevallyon, both Indian army officers.

Colonel Colin Chisholm, the present owner, says that beyond doubt the station was named Khancoban by them. But though he made extensive inquiries in India and elsewhere, and 'khan' stands for ‘Royal’ or ‘an inn’, no explanation of ‘coban’ can be found, and it is still a mystery.”

To this can be added 'khan' can also mean 'home' and that there was once an "old man called Cobban who lived in a derelict hut on site at the time the Indian Army officers took over." That is as close as we will get.

Now, this is why I love the internet. Both my correspondents decided that ‘Khancoban’ was easy to explain.

The first person wrote: "Khan means royalty in many countries but originally comes from the Turkic language as most leaders had the words kagan or khan written after their name.
The word çoban in Turkish means shepherd so it literally translates as 'royal shepherd'."

I may have been just a little sceptical (one source is never enough) but then, from a totally different source, this arrived: "The phrasal word Khan coban, is an Azerbaijani word. Azerbaijan is a country located in Caucus area. Coban in Azerbaijani means Shepherd. Khan Coban means the Top Shepherd as in those areas there are multiple shepherds but there is a master of them named Khancoban.

“A Coban had to earn the title Khan Coban through years of experience and only if people felt like calling them the Khancoban after years. Cobans and Khancobans live in high altitude areas and herd sheep there most seasons of the year as the high altitude vegetation as a food for sheep, brings better tasting and less watery milk."

Neither contradicts the original explanation of how Khancoban ended up in Australia. Both explain the meaning of the word.

What a wonderful thing is the internet? I love the idea that Aussie Towns acts as a conduit for information like this. It may seem small, but it is just another brick in the wall of knowledge about Australian history.

Oh, yes, and Khancoban is lovely beyond belief, particularly in spring and autumn. Check it out at

In autumn, Khancoban, which is nestled under the western edge of the Snowy Mountains, is as beautiful and dramatic as the iconic autumn towns in the area - Tumut, Bright and Canberra. Part of the appeal of the town and the area is the isolation. The Alpine Way, the main road from Jindabyne to Khanco...