Charters Towers

Had a day in Charters Towers and explored what was once one of Queensland's largest gold towns. This place was absolutely booming during the 1870s gold rush - at its peak it was Queensland's second-largest city after Brisbane, which is hard to imagine when you see it today.

First stop was the Towers Lookout for the obligatory panoramic views over the town and surrounding countryside. From up there you get a real sense of the scale of the place and can imagine what it must have been like when thousands of prospectors and miners descended on this spot chasing their fortunes.

The Charters Towers Wall of History is worth the time - tells the story of how this remote outback location became one of Australia's richest Goldfields. (The wall is a mosaic composition created from 5 million tiles.)

The gold finds here were extraordinary, and the town that grew up around the mines was surprisingly sophisticated for somewhere so isolated. At its height, Charters Towers had a stock exchange, numerous banks, grand hotels, and even electric street lighting before many of the major cities.

What's fascinating is how quickly it all happened and then declined. Within a couple of decades, Charters Towers went from a dusty cattle station to a thriving city of 30,000 people, then gradually faded as the gold ran out and people moved on to the next big strike.

Walking around today, you can still see the bones of that boom-time prosperity in the grand old buildings and wide streets designed for the traffic and commerce of a major regional centre. It's a classic Australian gold rush story - spectacular rise, massive wealth, then the inevitable decline when the easy gold was gone.

Worth the day trip to get a sense of just how dramatically the gold rushes shaped Queensland's development.Read more