Collingwood, Queensland

Collingwood Queensland
Population	0
Established	1874
Abolished	~1900
Elevation	252 m (827 ft)
Time zone	UTC+10 (UTC)
LGA(s)	Shire of Winton

Collingwood is a former town in the Channel Country in Central West Queensland, Australia, in the Shire of Winton.

Geography

Collingwood lay at the forks where the Western River empties into the Diamantina River, one of only three major confluences on the Diamantina, roughly 55 km west of Winton. Both rivers are braided at this point, a landform that gives the Channel Country its name. The townsite, which is still identified on many maps as Collingwood, lies on the Diamantina River Road a few kilometres south of the Kennedy Developmental Road, and there is a short road to the south of the former leading to what once was the Collingwood Cemetery.

History

Collingwood was founded in 1874, and it was hoped that the town would thrive and grow into a regional centre that would foster the development of pastoral activity in the Diamantina region, an industry of some local importance to this day. Collingwood was served by a horse-borne mail run between Winton and Boulia by 1885.

William Henry Corfield, later the mayor of Winton, mentioned Collingwood in his book Reminiscences of Queensland 1862-1899, published in 1921 (by which time Collingwood had long ceased to exist). After suffering a bout of malaria, he had returned to Queensland in 1878:

Passing through Townsville, I met Fitzmaurice, who told me that carrying had fallen away between Cooktown and the Palmer, and that he had left that district. He suggested that I should join with him in carrying to the western country, and added that he had been informed by a squatter that there was a good opening for a store at the Conn Waterhole, on the Diamantina River. This is about forty miles down the Western River, from where Winton now is.

The Conn Waterhole to which Corfield referred is a body of water at Collingwood, and some maps still identify it by that name today. It also seems to have been another name for Collingwood itself, as a later passage in Corfield’s book makes clear:

Our destination was Collingwood, more widely known as the Conn Waterhole, where the Government Surveyor had laid out a township situated about 40 miles west of Winton.

Corfield and his party were also trying to earn a reward of £50 for opening a new, more direct road into the lands that lay in Queensland’s west, but a road party had set out to do just that, and upon catching up with them, Corfield’s party discovered what the new road’s intended course was to be:

Fitzmaurice, whilst riding after the bullocks, met Mr. Bergin, the man in charge of the [road] party, who told Fitzmaurice that he was instructed to mark a direct line to Collingwood, on the Western River, and that he intended going up Thornhill Creek, cross the divide between the Landsborough and Diamantina Rivers, and then run down Jessamine and Mill's Creeks to the Western River, and thence to Collingwood.

In its heyday, Collingwood held races that were attended by crowds that were rather small, even with some race enthusiasts coming in from Winton. “A Correspondent”, who was not named, described these races – and mentioned a few other things about Collingwood – in an 1885 newspaper article:

Our Collingwood races came off last Thursday and Friday, 1st and 2nd October. The amount run for was £103 18s., which was mostly subscribed in our little town and in Winton, the Winton people assisting very well, as our townspeople always subscribe to their race meeting. The races were very successful considering the programme was not advertised or carried out as it ought to be according to racing rules. We had a fair attendance for the races, numbering between sixty and seventy people, several from Winton, and a few from Elderslie. Collingwood has two hotels and a small store – no private residences, only a few calico houses – on the banks of the Western.

The two-day event ended with a camel race, which the correspondent said “drew more attraction than any other part of the sport”.

Robert L. Jack, FGS, FRGS, a Government Geologist for Queensland, wrote in 1895 of an eventuality in his Geological Survey, Bulletin no. 1, Artesian Water in the Western Interior of Queensland, that might have saved Collingwood from what would turn out to be its actual fate. A drought striking the region had seriously depleted the waterhole on Mistake Creek upon which nearby Winton wholly depended for its water, leaving, Jack reckoned, only three weeks’ to a month’s supply of water for the town. He foresaw that it might become necessary to move Winton’s whole population, along with their livestock, to the Conn Waterhole at Collingwood. This, however, never came about.

Even though an atlas dating from 1901 identifies the lands abutting the town as “Excellent Country”, and even though traffic had to be diverted through the town in 1885 owing to drought along the usual road, putting Collingwood on the main road for a while, Collingwood never achieved its goal of regional dominance, mainly because of competition for this status from the town of Winton to the east. The railway arrived there in 1899, and Collingwood, which had never truly thriven throughout its few decades of existence, became a ghost town by about 1900.

Collingwood today

Today, no buildings are standing, and satellite views reveal only an undifferentiated patch of Channel Country scenery. The town’s former location today lies within the locality of Middleton, whose like-named centre, lying some 95 km to the west, is itself a depopulated (but not altogether deserted) town. The town of Collingwood is memorialized in the Collingwood Cemetery Marker, which is about the only physical trace left of Collingwood. A rough-hewn stone with a plaque fastened onto it lists eight persons known to be buried there.

Even though Collingwood passed into history more than a century ago, geographical details of the town still appear on some maps, even on modern online mapping services. At least one of these shows a small street grid, complete with street names.