Tales from Bush Graves – Cloncurry

Book excerpt: There are many lonely graves and isolated cemeteries scattered throughout the North Western area of Queensland. This book represents only a small gathering of information from a cross-section of outback inhabitants. Northwest Queensland is a very hard, harsh, rugged part of Australia, which has a strange beauty about it. Rocks and Spinifex surround the hills and valleys, with wide open plains and rivers. With fast cars and wide open roads the modern traveller can be forgiven for forgetting the days of the coach routes, and bush tracks that crisscrossed the country. The lonely miners and bush men who opened up much of this beautiful country and the black men who fought to keep the white man out often died and were buried in isolation, with few records accurately kept of their burials. There were literally hundreds of graves in Northwest Queensland some are virtually non-existent after many years of weathering and neglect, almost all lost in history, time and memories. The stories of their passing will be lost if it is not recorded. With the availability of modern technology people don’t have to face the hardships of their forebears who opened up the outback of Australia, faced droughts, floods, fires and being attacked by the local indigenous tribes. Here is a short history of some of those people who travelled the West and didn’t survive. Greg Humphrey