Ravenshoe, Qld, 4888

Celebrating its 100th year of settlement, Ravenshoe is widely known as Queensland’s highest town but there is much more to discover about this relaxed settlement.

Story By Carly Crummey

Now an unassuming dairy town nestled 920 metres above sea level in the green winding hills of the Atherton Tableland – 147km south-west of tropical Cairns – Ravenshoe has worn many hats since timber cutters discovered its seemingly endless rainforest bounty in 1899. But according to Vera Hepple, who was born in the misty town in 1942 to a dairy farmer and is a known source of local history thanks to her inherited memory for dates, it wasn’t until 1910 that the settlers came in force to claim and clear their blocks in the rich cedar country. “People came in different groups – there were the majors, as in the ‘main’ group, then the Charters Towers and the northern New South Wales groups,” she says. “In those days the town was known as Cedar Creek, but it was renamed after someone found a piece of Henry Kingsley’s 1862 romance novel Ravenshoe in an old tree stump.”
After settlement, the next major milestone was the birth of the railway line in 1916, which – being in the middle of World War I – was used to take timber from the rainforest to the armaments factories in New South Wales. But that wasn’t its only brush with war-time service – some 25 years later it was being used to cart thousands of soldiers from the camps that were set up in the safety of the inland rainforest to the coast – the gateway to the war in the Pacific. Vera says there were 80,000 soldiers living in the district at the time, with many of those based at Ravenshoe in the camps at the foot of Big and Little Millstream Falls. As a tribute to these men, there is a memorial on the main street of Tully Falls Road, but there is also an historical acknowledgment on the rail lines. While the railway was closed in 1988, the line between Ravenshoe and Tumoulin was reopened the following year to run a 1925-built steam train. A lively Grahame West is one of the founders of the Ravenshoe Historical Steam Railway, which enlists the last D17 loco operating in the world. It was sourced from Capella, inland from Rockhampton, and the original carriages are from nearby Mareeba and boast the original 1930s upholstery and fittings. “Every general in the Pacific campaign came to Ravenshoe – it was a very important place for the soldiers,” says Grahame, who helped to create a dedicated memorial carriage complete with a rising sun badge on the exterior.