Dimbulah

The township of Dimbulah (aboriginal word meaning “long waterhole”) was born after 1906 as a watering place for locomotives travelling from Mareeba to Chillagoe.

For many years, Dimbulah was the centre of a thriving tobacco industry. At its peak, there were approximately 800 growers in the area, producing over 8,000 tonnes of tobacco a year; however the last tobacco sales contracts in North Queensland were filled in early 2004 after a Federal Government and industry-funded buyout.

Camp 64

Owen Davies , the solo adventurer, author, and bushman walked 1,000 kilometres through the desert, with a pack of goats and two dingoes as his only company and also lived and worked for almost a decade on one of the most remote properties in the Northern Territory. He spent 13 years in the Territory, nine of those years were on Pungalina Station.

The building itself has been lovingly restored and fitted out by his own hand; from the sheep's wool-lined ceiling, to the lamp shades recycled from old billies, to the table tops made of the doors of an old tobacco shed in the Dimbulah district.

An eclectic outback collection of personal memorabilia fills the front room, along with items of local historical interest and framed photographs of Owen, flanked by his trusty goats and dingoes, walking across the red sand dunes of western Queensland.

Of the 80 or so camps he passed through between Camooweal and Birdsville, on the eastern edge of the Simpson Desert, number 64 stuck in Mr Davies' memory.

"Camp 64 was one of the remote, desolate, it was waterless, it was treeless,”Read more