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government.
Captain Robert Towns, and his partner, Alexander Stuart, became overlords of most of the
properties adjoining what are now Townsville and Ayr. By April 1873, when Robert Towns
died, his pastoral empire included Inkerman Downs, Leichhardt Downs, Woodstock,
Springfield and Jarvisfield, as well as half shares in Tondara, Kirknie and Kilbogie. Despite the
depredations of cattle ticks, flood, fire and aboriginal hunters (a flood in 1870 destroyed about
12,000 sheep in Jarvisfield) 12,000 of Towns' Shorthorns and Herefords were sold one year in
Melbourne for £9 a head. Most of Towns' Burdekin properties were purchased after his death
by the North Australian Pastoral Company. Alexander Stuart became Premier of New South
Wales and was knighted in 1885.
It was Robert Towns who established Townsville as a trading-post and a port for the Upper
Burdekin in 1864, soon supplanting Bowen, which had been designated as a municipality in
August 1863, and was named after the then Governor of Queensland. Nonetheless, Bowen
remained the administrative centre of northern Queensland for several years, with a supreme
court, hospital, post office, customs house, police-station and Crown Lands office.
By the time Towns died (in 1873), Townsville was a small but thriving community and port, with
properly constructed roads reaching inland as far as Dalrymple, Ravenswood and Charters
Towers, and south to Bowen itself.
A telegraph office had been opened in Townsville in 1869, soon after payable alluvial gold was
found in some gullies near Ravenswood. Gold-bearing reefs were discovered the following year,
and Ravenswood swiftly became an affluent little town, until upstaged by the even greater
discoveries and consequent affluence of Charters Towers, where gold was found in 1872.
359
Although silver-mining in the 1880s, and the arrival of the railway line from Townsville, sustained
Ravenswood for several years, its prosperity and population (5,000) peaked in 1903. Within
ten years the population had almost halved and there had been a crippling eight-month miners'
strike. By 1915 only two mines were working, and two years later all major mining operations
ceased.
Now few people live there and all that remains are some shanties and some faded historic
hotels, that stick out by the roadside like rotten molars in a toothless jaw.
Ayr's fortunes were fortunately not based on gold, but sugar. Since 1868 land had periodically
been resumed, or taken back, by the government from pastoral runs and made available to
small farmers and individuals. Called selections, they were limited, if used for agricultural
purposes, to 518 hectares (two square miles) and cost one pound per acre. The limit for grazing
land was 12 square miles. These selections were mainly taken up by property-owners, and by
those who were related to them or worked for them.
John Scott, who in 1872 selected over 1,000 hectares at Norham, not far from Ayr and
McDesme, was the first to grow a small crop of sugar cane. It was cut for him by a sugar
industry entrepreneur and road-builder, Archibald Macmillan, who in 1879 established the first
major plantation and sugar mill in the area. Called Airdmillan, it began producing quantities of
Burdekin sugar in July 1883. But prices were low, and expenditure and the costs of extravagant
lifestyles and business operations were very high - over 200 Kanakas and 100 Europeans
(including 60 Maltese) were employed at the mill. Within three years Macmillan and Airdmillan
were out of business and broke. It is said that the name McDesme was made up from the initials
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