Quilpie was gazetted as a town in 1917 owing to the Western railway line that was laid down from Brisbane. It takes its name from the Indigenous Australian word for stone curlew, quilpeta. The name was proposed by pastoralist James Hammond of Tenham Station.
While visiting, we stayed at The Lake, as they call it. The Quilpie Lake is located approximately 4 Klms East of Quilpie, on the Diamantina Developmental Road, turn opposite Old Charleville Rd across Railway ( as on their website ). Some locals are of an opinion that The Lake area should have been nationalised by the local council and cultivated as a serene natural area or a form of a national park, but they have privately sold the place to private owners instead. I wonder which version the travellers would concern? In my opinion, the area should be given back to the custody of local traditional owners, council excluded, and private ownership banned. But we enjoyed our stay, again met some wonderful people, locals, travellers, and an unusually outstanding couple staging up their photo-shooting skills so transparent that one could see through all their actions as through an uninteresting act 🙂
According to Norman Tindale, the Punthamara’s tribal territories embraced roughly 3,200 square miles (8,300 km2), along the creeks flowing east of the Grey Range, whose western flank they lived about only as far as Mount Margaret and Congie. They were also present at Tobermorey, on the border with the present-day Northern Territory. Running north from Orient and Thargomindah, their lands approached the vicinity of Quilpie.
