It’s only a 90 minute drive to Townsville from Cardwell but it’s a very different place, we didn’t get much rain in Cardwell but Townsville looks like it hasn’t rained for a thousand years. I set up camp and the Rowes Bay caravan park to finalise the solar setup for car and van. I had trouble finding an auto electrician with any interest in helping me get one part of the setup organised, even standing in an empty workshop offering cash I was told it’s not something he’d get involved in!!! After three days in the beachside desert I headed west on the Flinders Highway to Charters Towers in the hope I’d find gold, over the years the area has coughed up a substantial amount of gold, the only problem for me is, it’s mixed in with lots of dirt.

Charters Towers the town was born in 1870 after a young aboriginal boy found gold by chance whilst searching for his horse that had bolted in a lightning storm, the 12 year old boys name was Jupiter Mosman. So much gold was found that the town swelled to over 30,000 and even had its own stock exchange and became the second largest city in Queensland at the time.

The town has many heritage listed buildings from the era, the post office the most impressive for me. After setting up camp in the closest caravan park to town and one that offered a site backing onto the local golf course.

For a place founded on gold and talks up its tourism as a gold town, it wasn’t so inviting, the friendly old ladies in the information center couldn’t help but showed a lot of interest in trying to find the info I was chasing. It was then onto the local prospecting shop where I found even less interest from the guy behind the counter. It seems the attitude is, its our town, our gold, your not welcome.

I checked out a few of the tourist spots around town and organised a game of golf on the Thursday arvo comp before a flash storm flooded out the park and disappeared as quick as it came.

I’d heard of a local old gold town that may still be worth checking out, so I decided it was worth the hour drive to check it out and see if I could relocate there for the weekend and hunt the yellow stuff.

Gold was first discovered in the Ravenswood area in 1868 over the next 30 years the towns population topped 5000 and said to have boasted 48 hotels…… its hard to believe this number but the history books are sticking to the story. I only found two and to be honest I thought the town had more pubs that the current population commanded.

No more than one kilometer from town, a gold mine is still being mined and I found a campground close by to setup camp and do some panning in the rivers close by. I grabbed a bucket of dirt that I hoped would become paydirt to pan up later and headed back to town and take a closer look at the two hotels. I chose the Imperial Hotel first and had a chat with the lady behind the bar about the building and where her income comes from with so few locals.

She told me they had plenty of fifo gold miners who don’t mind a beer living in town and the locals keep them going. The building constructed in 1901 was amazing, the timber staircase rivaled my favorite (Queenstown, Tasmania) and behind the main bar was something out of an American western film. She talked about ghosts and other stories that come with old pubs like this before doing her best to talk me into come and stay for the weekend. Ravenswood was about to fill up with a motorcycle club from Mount Isa, (from memory) she told me it was the Rebels Motorcycle club, one of them owned the Railway Hotel just up the road and the only other pub to survive of the amazing number of 48 pubs in town.

If I was to take her word for it, the weekend promised to be one of the great weekends in this town, not only was the Railway hotel fully booked with Rebels bikies, hers was fully booked as was the campground… I decided I wouldn’t relocate Ravenswood for the weekend, golf was more my pace.

I had to check out the Railway Hotel especially now it had six small military vehicles with trailers parked out front. Like the Imperial, the Railway looks well looked after from the outside, I approached the empty bar but for one guy in full army gear sipping a coke and chatting to a girl of Asian appearance about 20 years old, the patch over his left breast told me his name was Chubb, her open top and loose bikini top told me she was happy for Mr. Chubb to take a peek.

The barmaid approached me and closed the open top shirt, I ordered a beer and wondered the old hotel. Being a hot day I finished my beer in record time and returned to the bar to see Mr. Chubb copping a fair look at the left one that was now fully exposed, again it was covered up as my beer was poured and I couldn’t help wonder why I wasn’t worthy of a look, I wasn’t clad in army attire like Mr. Chubb but surely worthy of a peak had I wanted it… I was a prospector after all.

I remained in the bar as a couple of guys took a perched at the bar, I had a chat to Mr. Chubb who came from Eden on the far south coast of NSW, he was training with the other guys out the front of the Railway, they had driven up from Townsville where they are based and were heading into the bush to be assessed before they graduated.

I noticed a Budweiser Sturgis Bike Rally 2013 sign behind the bar and a couple of “proud to be a son/daughter of a Vietnam Vet” stickers on the fridge along with a Vietnam Veterans MC stickers, maybe it wasn’t the Rebels MC? I still didn’t see a point in hanging around for the weekend so I checked out the garden next to pub with loads of rusted old mining machinery and headed back to Charters Towers.

I found a couple of places to hunt down the gold, Young’s Block it turns out is a piece of dedicated land to the prospector, I spent some time checking it out but with only a $100 metal detector, a gold pan and no water I didn’t do so well in the 40c heat. Back at the park I filled a large container with water and panned out my Ravenswood paydirt and found my first ever “small” spec of gold. I am sure now, that I have some experience I’d find some places in Charters Towers to pan for gold and if I’d had a gold detector even better so don’t let my experience put you off because Charters Towers is a great town and this was my first go at this prospecting caper other than our great experience in the WA gold fields.

I must mention the golf before I leave, played a couple of rounds before the clubs main Sunday comp, I was grouped with a couple of old guys and Roderick a guy or around 35 who tried to smash to cover off the ball every chance he had. We also picked up some young brothers along the way to make a group of six on this great golf course that had green grass on the tees and the putting greens but it was all red dirt in between. For $3 you could purchase a fake grass mat 300x300mm to hit the ball off instead of the red dirt fairways.

I’d done ok prior to the comp but lost it on the day and put a large number up, around 120, not great for the handicap that! Unlike other bad days I could stop laughing because I knew I wasn’t that bad, one of the older guys took a shine to me I guess because I laughed off my ordinary form. Turns out Norm Carrington was the club legend and part time teacher of the game, after some gentle persuasion, he offered to give me a lesson the next day. Best thing I’ve ever done, I had to change everything, but as I got used to it I’m playing much better, not for a full 18 holes but much better over all. Norm wouldn’t accept any money so I purchased a thank you card, a lotto ticket and put $20 in it with the words;

“Thanks for taking time out of your day to help me with my golf, you’re a great teacher. Let’s hope I can be as good a student. Enjoy a couple of drinks on me”. 

I dropped it back at the club with his name on it and hope he got it, someone I will most likely never see again but appreciate what he did and had no doubt done for many around the Charters Towers Golf Club for years. I took some time to read the names on the honor boards in the club, Norms name is everywhere so no doubt he could play in his day.

I left town the next day headed South to grab Shell and head west to find gem stones out near Emerald (yep that’s right) but not before I wondered the back of the golf club closest to the park I was in and picked up around 80 golf balls, now I’ve had a lesson I guess I should practice a bit.

Charters Towers is out the back of Townsville on the way to the outback but it’s a great town, the narrow winding main street with its grand old buildings is one worth seeing. It has plenty of secondhand or relic stores full of great things left behind by the 30,000 miners, I spent plenty of time in these stores checking out the old bottles, signs, mining tools and so much more.

I may not have found any gold worthy of talking about, but no doubt I’ll find plenty of gemstones in central Queensland.