Qualla: Ravenswood Mining Landscape and Chinese Settlement Area

Ravenswood Mining Landscape and Chinese Settlement Area: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 4.0. The chimneys give it away from a distance. Five of them, red brick, square and round and octagonal, stand among low hills of broken rock as if a town once grew here and then thought better of it. This is Ravenswood, the oldest surviving inland town in North Queensland, and the undulating ground around it is not natural. Every rise is mullock, the waste rock that miners hauled up and dumped while chasing gold through reefs with names like the Sunset, the General Grant, and the Duke of Edinburgh. Between 1868 and 1917, nearly a million ounces of gold came out of the little triangle of dry gullies beneath your feet.

Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 4.0

Ravenswood Mining Landscape and Chinese Settlement Area: Gold That Would Not Come Easily

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 4.0. The first rush, in 1869, was the easy kind. Alluvial gold lay in three dry creek beds, Nolan's, Jessop's and Buchanan's gullies, and the reefs near the surface gave up their gold to simple crushing machines. Then the mines hit the water table at about seventy feet, and the gold c...

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Ravenswood Mining Landscape and Chinese Settlement Area: Deighton Street and the Chinese Gardens

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 4.0. By 1872 around 1,500 Chinese people lived and worked on the Ravenswood field, matched by a similar number of Europeans. Many had been forcibly evicted from diggings further north and arrived here looking to begin again. Deighton Street, just west of the main road, became the hear...

Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 4.0

Ravenswood Mining Landscape and Chinese Settlement Area: The Earliest Temple in Queensland

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 4.0. South of Deighton Street, a series of low concrete and stone platforms is all that remains of a Chinese temple. It is easy to walk past. But this temple appears on a survey plan drawn in 1874, which makes it the earliest known Chinese temple anywhere in Queensland, older than tho...

Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 4.0

Ravenswood Mining Landscape and Chinese Settlement Area: The Wilson Boom and the Long Quiet

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 4.0. The town's last great surge belonged to one man. Archibald Lawrence Wilson raised capital in London and floated the New Ravenswood Company in 1899, reworking the old mines and tailings with modern machinery. Shareholders made their money back in two years, the news travelled the ...

Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 4.0

Ravenswood Mining Landscape and Chinese Settlement Area: Reading the Ruins

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 4.0. Walk the unsealed tracks today and the landscape reads like a textbook of mining you can touch. Caved shafts ringed by modern fences. Winding-engine mounts of brick and concrete with their metal fixtures still embedded. Rusting Cornish boilers, one stamped "John Danks & Son Pty L...

Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 4.0