The lure of a goldfield is seductive.
It beguiles by the promise of quick riches; wealth enough to dissolve all life’s problems.
Get in, get rich, get out.
But the haunt of the win changes men.
It’s a haunting only understood by men who have made a find, by those who have felt the rush of the strike.
It’s a haunting that twists a man’s mind.
Soon it becomes less about the gold and more about the heart thumping elation of the find.
It’s the endless possibility of the next find that haunts a man.
And there is scant hierarchy on a goldfield.
No traditional sorting by wealth, birth, education, age or profession.
Only two strata exist; those who have found and those who have not.
Unlike traditional societies, it is easy to flit between the two.
All this was never truer than on the goldfield known as Cracow.
Today, Cracow attracts attention from tourists, not those with pick, shovel and pan, but those with camera and curiosity.
It’s not so much about the gold, but the empty homes of those who sought the gold.
There’s a fascination about a town which was once the centre of a scattered population of anywhere between 2,000 and 4,000 (there doesn’t seem to have ever been a true count) and is now home to around 30 people.
Most of the houses stand empty, the shops are boarded up and the public hall houses little but detritus and decaying timber. The Catholic church retains its altar and pews but it is a long time since congregants patterned the dusty floor with footsteps.
All life in the town now centres on the pub. This two storey building dominates a right angle corner of the Eidsvold Theodore Road and until recently was the staging point for the last of the once famous itinerant boxing tents.
But Fred Brophy has taken his show on the road after welcoming visitors and guests to the Cracow Hotel for more than 20 years.
The pub is now owned by a couple who met in the bar. They preside over an eclectic gathering of mining memorabilia from the town’s heyday, the bedrooms themed on countries of the world, the well stocked bar, the locals who have plenty of tales to tell and the resident ghost.
And while most of the buildings are deserted and in a ramshackle state, the roadsides are mowed and the power and telephone poles are in place.
It’s as if life in the town is suspended, as if the open doors of the deserted homes stand open in readiness for the next big strike.
The last of the state’s big gold rushes was on a slow burn from around 1913 when an Aboriginal stockman, Jacky Nipps, found gold bearing quartz when he stopped to rest his horse under one of the many tall bottle trees that proliferate in the area.
His find was about eight kilometres from the Cracow Cattle Station homestead.
The story goes that Jacky Nipps showed his find to a well-sinker who he knew spent time prospecting. That man, Charles Lambert, assayed the field but there was little water available for prospecting due to drought and he had few resources and so the find remained unheralded.
Service in World War I intervened as did other rushes around Central Queensland so it was not until February 1931 that Lambert, his son, and two partners returned to the original find.
Two weeks after arriving, the group found the ‘quartz lode’ of a quality indicating the prospect that it was an outcrop of a rich body of ore. The partners were granted the ‘reward claim’ which they named ‘Suprise’[‘Surprise’].
News of a gold strike travelled fast especially in a country deep in an economic depression. And so the rush began.
The following comes from Lambert’s obituary in the Morning Bulletin (Rockhampton) in 1951: “By May 1931, the rush had set in, placing on the mining map such names as Golden Plateau, Golden Mile and Golden Hill.
“A township of canvas and rough buildings grew among the hills.”
(The Golden Plateau mine was established and it operated continuously until 1976.)
“A township was proclaimed and surveyed, and a land sale in November, 1932, yielded £46,659, including £3,000 for one business block. A total of 125 allotments were auctioned.
“At the end of that year there were 2000 to 3000 people on the field.
“Companies were formed to develop the area, the principal being Golden Plateau Ltd.”
By 1937 it boasted it’s own rugby team, a town band, a hospital with nurses quarters, a police station and residence, a court house, a large guesthouse, two churches, a large picture theatre, five cafes, a barber shop, a billiard saloon, two butchers, a soft drink factory and two more ore crushing mills. In addition, a hotel was under construction.
The original find was made on Cracow Station near what was called Little Cracow Creek and the goldfield was referred to as Cracow.
When the town was officially surveyed, it seemed that no one objected to it too being called Cracow.
But what prompted the first station owner to name his run after an ancient Polish city.
There is some debate but the most commonly repeated explanation is that John Mackenzie Ross, a romantic at heart, named it in honour of the Poles of the Free State of Krakow, whose 1840s uprising was brutally crushed and their state was annexed by the Austrian Empire. It seems he admired their spirit.
Perhaps it was the odd name or more likely it was the interest of his long time friend, that drew journalist, author and artist, Lionel Lindsay, to the goldfield in 1932.
Lindsay was accompanied on that visit by his friend, George Bedford, in the Golden Plateau Mine. It was Bedford who had convinced The Bulletin editor, Samuel Prior, to send the party to the goldfield to write an article and produce etchings from illustrations for the Sydney-based periodical.
While Lindsay, one of the five Lindsay siblings who were talented artists and writers, certainly captured some of the scenes on the goldfields, it would appear that what drew out the artist was the stands of tall, narrow-leaved bottle trees (Brachychiton ruprestris).
A few of those drawings, now held in the National Library of Australia, are used to illustrate this column.
