Collingwood was a former town in the Channel Country in Central West Queensland, Australia, in the Shire of Winton. Collingwood was founded in the 1870s, and it was hoped that the town would thrive and grow into a regional centre that would foster the development of pastoral activity in the Diamantina region, an industry of great local importance to this day. However, Collingwood ultimately failed as a town and was given up after only about two decades of existence.
Geography Location Collingwood was roughly 11 km up the Western River from the forks where it empties into the Diamantina River, one of only three major confluences on the Diamantina, roughly 52 km west of Winton. Both rivers are braided at this point, a landform that gives the Channel Country its name. Wokingham Creek, too, meets the Diamantina here, and feeds the Conn Waterhole (), a hook-shaped body of water just up from the Diamantina whose size fluctuates with the region's climatic fortunes; drought is a common phenomenon here. A smaller stream, called Haine Creek (or Maine Creek – sources differ), empties into the Western from the south at the Collingwood site. Other streams nearby are Scarlet Creek, which empties into the Western from the south about 8 km upstream from the townsite, and Gum Creek, which empties into Mulray Creek, which empties into the Diamantina itself some 21 km southwest of the townsite, and roughly 14 km downstream from where the Western empties into the Diamantina. Lydia Creek empties into the Western from the south about two fifths of the way up to Winton. The land in the area is mostly flat grassland (specifically, Mitchell grass downs), although locally, there are a few points where the land rises above the surrounding flatness, among them Mount Booka Booka 10.5 km to the northwest, Mount Munro 12.4 km to the north, Mount Boorooma 15 km to the south, Mount Capo Goleburra 19 km to the south-southeast and Mount Hardwick right at the Conn Waterhole, 6.5 km northwest of the former town. The townsite, which is still identified on many maps as Collingwood, lies on the Diamantina River Road some four kilometres along from its junction with the Kennedy Developmental Road lying to the north, and there is a short road to the south of the former leading to what once was the Collingwood Cemetery. Upwards of 70 sheep and cattle stations lie within 70 km of the Collingwood site, some of which even date from the time when the town existed (see Collingwood today below), and figured in the town's short history.
Geology and palaeontology Collingwood also lay in the Great Artesian Basin. Nevertheless, there does not seem to be any record of an artesian bore ever being attempted at Collingwood, as was done in many other places in Outback Queensland, even locally (as at Dagworth, 65 km to the northwest, in the 1890s) often with great success. Geologically, the site lies in the Eromanga Basin. More locally, the geology consists of the Cretaceous Winton Formation, and it was at Manfred Station (), 168 km from Collingwood's former site, where the formation yielded up at least two palaeobotanical fossils to a J. Williams in 1920. More recently, in 2005, Australovenator and Diamantinasaurus matildae Early Cretaceous dinosaur remains were unearthed by palaeontologists at the "Matilda site" not far north of the former town, on Elderslie Station (). A "major fault" passes just southeast of the Collingwood site, called the Cork Fault. It runs roughly northeast to southwest. Its downthrow is to the northwest, towards Collingwood. Seismic studies along this fault began in 1960 with the Bureau of Mineral Resources (now Geoscience Australia). In the years that followed, a number of other surveys were conducted by private companies, among which was the Western River Seismic Survey in 1967 by the United Geophysical Corporation, which was "aimed at further defining the Permo–Triassic section on the downthrown (west) side of the Cork Fault indicated by the previous Collingwood survey (Phillips, 1966)." This information is all held in a report that also mentions petroleum exploration in the area, with one exploratory well sunk about 20 km north of the former townsite, at Lovelle Downs (). Drilling was underway late in 1972 by Hematite Petroleum. The Cork Fault might have begun as long ago as the Mesoproterozoic (1.6 to 1.0 billion years ago), when it would have been part of a great network of active normal faults in the land that would eventually come to be known as Australia, although then, the land was part of the supercontinent of Rodinia. The team from Monash University who reached these conclusions and presented them in 2015, namely Giovanni P. T. Spampinato, Laurent Aillères, Peter G. Betts and Robin J. Armit, believed that while the Cork Fault was to be regarded as a fundamental crustal discontinuity, it was not Rodinia's former eastern margin. This they believe because the Cork Fault is the line in the Earth's crust where the Proterozoic Mount Isa terrane (the fault's downthrown side mentioned above) has been thrust under the Phanaerozoic Thomson Orogen (the upthrown side).
Robert Logan Jack, FGS, FRGS, the Government Geologist for Queensland, wrote a report on the region (and indeed all Queensland) in 1892. Along with fellow geologist Robert Etheridge, Junior, the New South Wales Government Palaeontologist, Jack identified "a bed of gypsum, of workable thickness, and of great purity" at Chollarton, a place said by Jack to lie near Collingwood (although the name only seems to appear in one other place in the records, also in connection with Jack's work). Jack also mentioned in his report that the area between Wokingham Creek and the Diamantina River, just north of the town, was characterised by grey sandstones "with occasional sandy ironstone or ironmasked sandstone". He furthermore wrote that there was silicified wood strewn over the ground. Jack's report also makes clear that there are coal seams in the region. A well sunk about 1878 between Werna and Ayrshire Downs, about 50 km north of Collingwood, struck two such seams, and otherwise yielded strata of grey sandstones and sandy shales with beds of argillaceous flagstone (which contained seashells) and sandstone with iron pyrites. The well also yielded forth many fragments of silicified and carbonised wood. The boring ended at 204 feet (62 m) in hard, fine-grained sandstone. Water was struck at two levels below the first coal seam. Other wells in the region, too, struck coal (but not always water).
Possible asteroid strike
The Diamantina River's hook-shaped upper reaches have drawn scientific attention. In March 2015, Geoscience Australia reported that the river's course at and near its headwaters flows along the edge of a roughly circular crustal anomaly that might well be an impact structure. It is 130 km in diameter, and the Collingwood site lies right at its eastern edge. The asteroid impact, if indeed this is the explanation for the anomaly, would have happened roughly 300 million years ago.
Bioregion In terms of bioregions, the Collingwood site lies within the Galilee subregion, itself part of the Lake Eyre Basin bioregion.
History
Indigenous peoples In the time before European colonisation, the Diamantina River, passing right by the townsite, served as a north-south trade highway for Indigenous Australians. The Maiawali and Karuwali traded such goods as boomerangs, shields and pituri for yellow ochre, stone for making tools, and various other things.
The semi-arid climate that characterises the Collingwood site and the surrounding area can be inhospitable. At least one early attempt by Europeans to colonise the area was thwarted by drought, leading settlers to choose to leave. Indigenous people, though, have lived in the Channel Country for thousands of years. According to the Queensland Historical Atlas, it was "Permanent waterholes and periodic pulses of substantial water" in the form of, sometimes heavy, rain that "allowed Aboriginal people to live in great numbers in the Channel Country". Actual Indigenous population figures from the time before European colonisation are unavailable, but John McKinlay, who passed near Collingwood's future site in 1862 while leading the South Australian Burke Relief Expedition (see European exploration in the area below) remarked that Indigenous people "seemed to pour out from every nook and corner where there was water". One of these places would have been the Conn Waterhole, which does not dry up in times of drought, and it lies right near the Collingwood site, and also right near McKinlay's route.
In a native title claim application initiated in 2015 by the Koa people (also called Goamalku, Goamulgo, Goa, Coah, Coa, Guwa or Kuwa, depending on the text), the Koa, claiming descent from a group of 16 persons who lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were seeking to have traditional rights recognised in an area comprising 30 000 km2 of "the headwaters of the Diamantina River in what is now Northwest Queensland". Part of the basis of their claim is that Indigenous people's occupation of that land, their resource use and their trade were documented by Robert Christison in 1863 and R. M. Watson in 1873 in an area that included Winton, Elderslie Station and the Conn Waterhole at the junction of Wokingham Creek and the Diamantina River (Collingwood's former site). Linguistic and ethnographic evidence was also submitted in connection with this application, consisting of writings made by early White settlers. One of these accounts stated as follows:
...and extracted a range of food and other resources from their country essential to their sustenance and to the conduct of daily and traditional life. For example, Christison recorded that the ‘Goamulku' traded pituri for quartz flakes with the neighbouring ‘Dallabarra' group... [and] ...their ancestors used to trade gidgee wood spears and boomerangs with other tribes in the area.National Native Title Tribunal (Australia) Registration test decision; NNTT file no. QC2015/007; Federal Court of Australia file no. QUD592/2015; Applicants Robert Beckett, Frank Button, Natasha Duncan, William Gorham, Pamela Hegarty, Michael Mace, Frank Peterson (Koa People); Decision handed down 28 September 2015; Author Lisa Jowett; Retrieved 14 July 2016
The area that the Koa claim as their ancestral homeland is shown on a map accompanying their application. Despite having been a ghost town for well over a century, Collingwood is marked on this map, inside the homeland.
European exploration in the area
At least one account of the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition tells that the two explorers and their party, on their northward journey, passed by the townsite in 1860 as they followed the Diamantina River. "This route would take them close to the future sites of Birdsville, Monkira [], Davenport Downs, Diamantina Lakes, Brighton Downs [], Cork [], Collingwood, Kynuna, McKinlay and Cloncurry." Other accounts, though, have the expedition leaving the river once it swung eastwards – presumably meaning at the bend near Birdsville – and heading northwards, eventually along Eyre Creek. This makes it highly doubtful that Burke and Wills ever came within sight of Collingwood.
In less doubt is that John McKinlay's South Australian Burke Relief Expedition, a quest to find any sign of the vanished Burke and Wills expedition, came within a stone's throw of Collingwood's future site, if the explorers did not actually set foot there. McKinlay's Camp 32, where the expedition stayed overnight on 9 April 1862, was, as shown on a Royal Geographical Society map from 1863, right near the Conn Waterhole. Indeed, it may have been that very waterhole that McKinlay meant when he wrote in his journal about "Kell's Creek", where there was "plenty of water".