Qualla: Mining Works on Towers Hill

Mining Works on Towers Hill: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. Every town has a hill it is named for, but few hills have done as much work as this one. Towers Hill is a hump of bare granite, 421 metres above the sea and rising sharply from the flat country around Charters Towers, and almost everything important about the place radiates from it. Here, in December 1871, an Aboriginal boy named Jupiter tracked bolted horses into a gully and found the gold that started it all. Here the first crushing machines pounded ore and the first furnaces roasted it. Here a jilted man built a folly of a chimney. And here, seventy years later, the army carved bunkers into the slopes against a feared Japanese invasion. The hill remembers all of it.

Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0

Mining Works on Towers Hill: Where the Gold Began

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. The prospecting party of late 1871 - Hugh Mosman, George Clarke, John Fraser, and the boy Jupiter - camped among the quartz-strewn outcrops on the northwestern flank of this hill, near what they would name the North Australia Reef. The Mining Warden, William Charters, granted the...

Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0

Mining Works on Towers Hill: Furnaces and the Rainbow

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. Finding gold was the easy part; getting it out of stubborn ore was the science. On the eastern slope stand the most extensive remains of a pyrites chlorination works in Queensland - a cascade of stone and brick mill foundations, the footings of two furnaces with their internal br...

Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0

Mining Works on Towers Hill: Brown's Folly

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. Not every story on the hill is about gold. The tallest landmark here for decades was a great brick chimney that locals knew as 'Brown's Folly.' Its builder, David Brown, would never see it become a curiosity. In 1901 he was tried for murder at the Charters Towers Courthouse, sent...

Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0

Mining Works on Towers Hill: A Hill at War, a Hill at Rest

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. When the Second World War reached the Pacific, Charters Towers became a major Allied base, and Towers Hill was fortified. Miners' mullock dumps were repurposed into four form-cast concrete explosives stores, part of a larger complex of wartime bunkers cut into the southwestern sl...

Image: Unknown author | Public domain