Straddling the Tropic of Capricorn, 100km north of Gladstone, ROCKHAMPTON was founded after a false goldrush in 1858 left hundreds of miners stranded at a depot 40km inland on the banks of the sluggish Fitzroy River; their rough camp below Mount Archer was adopted by local stockmen as a convenient port. The iron trelliswork and sandstone buildings fronting the river recall the balmy 1890s, when money was pouring into the city from central Queensland's prosperous cattle industry and the gold and copper mines 40km west at Mount Morgan . Today, however, despite hosting a large university campus, Rockhampton feels a bit despondent: the mines have closed (though before they did, they managed to fund the fledgling BP Company), the beef industry is down in the dumps and the summers, unrelieved by coastal breezes, are appallingly humid. Bearing this in mind, the city is best seen as a springboard for the adjacent Capricorn Coast, but with half a day to spare it's worth catching the Aboriginal version of history at the Dreamtime Centre; and there are a group of limestone caves to the north to poke around in.
The City
It doesn't take long to look around the city. The Tropic Marker, 3km south of the river at Rockhampton's southern entrance, is just a spire informing you of your position at 23° 26' 30" S. And, apart from a riverside stroll to take in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century architecture or the brown-stained boulders in mid-stream that gave the city its name, there's very little to detain you.
About 5km north of town on the Bruce Highway, the Dreamtime Cultural Centre (daily 10am-3.30pm; tours with an Aboriginal guide from 10.30am; $14) offers a good introduction to central Queensland's Aboriginal heritage. Inside, chronological and Dreamtime histories are intermingled, with a broad dissection of the archeology and mythology of Carnarvon Gorge. Outside, surrounded by woodland, gunyahs (shelters of bark and branches) and stencil art, you'll find an unlikely walk-through dugong, and the original stone rings of a bora ground which marked the main camp of the Darumbal, whose territory reached from the Keppel Bay coastline inland to Mount Morgan. The tour also introduces plant usage, plus boomerang, dance and didgeridoo skills - audience participation is definitely encouraged. |
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