• History Stories - Outback Ruins

    The JC

    In the late 1860s pastoralist and adventurer John Costello rode west from his holdings on Kyabra Creek, exploring the Channel Country out to the Diamantina. One night he camped beside a small creek, where he stripped back the bark of a bauhinia tree and carved his initials, JC. That tree…

  • History Stories - Outback Ruins

    Mary Watson of Lizard Island

    The ruins of a stone cottage, once the home of pioneer Mary Watson, lie crumbling up behind the beach at Watson’s Bay on Lizard Island, three hundred kilometres north of Cairns. Mary was born in Cornwall, and her family settled in Maryborough, Queensland, when she was seventeen. Both educated and…

  • History Stories - Outback Ruins

    The Paddle Steamer Providence

    ( Twin fireboxes, once attached to the Providence’s boiler, still lie on the banks of the Darling near Kinchega Station. ) The year was 1872, and for twelve months the 78-foot-long wooden paddle steamer Providence, under the leadership of Captain John Davis, sat on a waterhole north of Menindee waiting…