About Charleville
Charleville is a rural service centre on the Warrego River. With a population of over 3,000, it is the largest town in South West Queensland. Surrounded by rich pastoral land, it grew to prominence as an important transportation stopover between the vast properties of western Queensland and the vital rail-head at Roma. Today the town is an important centre with offices of both the School of Distance Education and the Royal Flying Doctor Service (sourced from the Aussie Towns website – click for more).
Getting there
Its a 201km trip from Cunnamulla to Charleville travelling straight north on the Mitchell Hwy (route map). We made a couple of stops along the way…
Wyandra
Wyrandra is exactly half way between Cunnamulla to Charleville, so we pulled in for coffees. There’s really only one thing in this town worth stopping for and it’s the Wyandra Post Office, General Store and Caravan Park (maplink). The bloke who runs this place is a real scream who serves great brewed coffee and freshly made scones. His humour is something else! Find it n WikiCamps
Angellala Bridge Monument
On Friday 5th September 2014, a truck carrying 52.8 tonnes of ammonium nitrate was involved in a single-vehicle incident. The blast radius was more than 1 kilometre and was the equivalent power to 10-15 tonnes of TNT; so powerful that 30 km away Charleville residents thought there was an earthquake. A police car travelling to the scene was damaged about 200 metres away from the blast.
In fact, the explosion was measured as a seismic event measuring 2.1 on the Richter scale. The explosion site looked like a war zone with the complete demolition of the road bridge and as well as the Angellala rail bridge, that had stood since 1897. Thankfully not a life was lost.
The monument symbolises the bridge and the information boards provided represent the human and historic aspects of the site. The memorial is located 8.2kms north of the town of Bakers bend (maplink)
Accommodation
It’s pretty funny as I’d listed the phone number of another caravan park for the one we intended to stay at, so upon arrival all we got was “you’re not booked in here mate!” so with a quick phone call we discovered that we’d actually booked the Bailey Bar Caravan Park instead and it proved to be a pretty good mistake.
Even though this park is in need of some pretty serious upgrading (one WikiCamp review said “This Park should be demolished, the Public Health need to visit!! Only shining light was Darren a lovely guy) we enjoyed our stay here. A camp barby on our 1st night and then a camp oven stew on our last night was excellent. Our hosts were really nice and put on a great dinner too. We had 3 nights staying here.
Around the town
Charleville Historic House & Museum
Dating back to 1887 the building was purpose built as Charleville’s first national bank, before it went onto become a private boarding house until the 1970’s.
Filled to the brim with treasures of yesteryear, some dating back as far as the 1800’s, you’ll be surprised at what you’ll find and it’s well worth your time to take a look. It’s located in Alfred Street Charleville (maplink).
Many of the original features of the bank still remain which include marble fireplaces and the vault. The display is completed with a large early day machinery display in the grounds including a life size replica Cobb & Co Coach, Rail Ambulance and Steam Engine.
Charleville Water Tower
The Charleville & Cunnamulla Water Towers were painted by renowned artist Guido van Helten in 2019. It’s located in Parry Street Charleville (maplink).
Separated by 200 km, Cunnamulla and Charleville are joined by the rivalry they share of a simple game. They meet twice a year, then complete in a grand final where they are destined to try and best each other. The murals of both represents the significance of the game to the community.
Charleville Railway Station
Charleville railway station is a heritage-listed railway station on the Western line in King Street (maplink). It was built from 1888 to 1957.
The tourist information centre is located in the station building. While we were there a train was waiting at the platform to begin it’s 17.5 hour trip to Brisbane.
Cosmos Centre
With great expectations we booked into the Charleville Cosmos Centre for their evening show called the Big Sky Observatory and it was terribly disappointing. With the sales pitch beginning with “A mesmerising sky filled with thousands of stars, combined with the beauty of deep celestial objects all come alive in front of your very eyes during your adventure to the Big Sky Observatory” you’d expect to see some pretty spectacular stuff but you just get an enlargement of watch you see with the naked eye. I’m sorry but it sucked! The guy doing the presentation is really knowledgable, so no complaints there, it’s just it didn’t even come close to my expectations of what the telescope would show you of our galaxy. Even the final “coup-de-graph” of viewing Saturn was a total disappointment. My score is a lowly 2 out of 10.
WW II Secret Airbase
An interesting fact we discovered was that, during WW II the US established a strategic Secret Airbase in Charleville. In 1943 there were 3500 United States Army Air Force personnel stationed in here.
We made 2 visits to the airbase – a self guided tour through the museum and then a 2 hour “tagalong” with a guide around what used to be the secret US airbase. It’s located at the Charleville Airport (maplink)
1st visit – Secret Airbase Museum
Our 1st visit was to the static display housed in the main building. There’s plenty to learn about this “secret base” and it’s really well set-up. The interactive bomb drop is great and out of the 4 of us only Merrisa could successfully drop the bomb on the target.
The rumour is (no facts here because it’s still an official secret place) that the Americans set-up the base to act as a strategic location, far enough inland that the Japanese bombers could not reach it.
2nd visit – Secret Airbase grounds tour
Back again to the secret airbase, this time to take the tagalong tour through some of the vast area the original base had occupied.
Taking up 25sq km with 101 Australian purpose built buildings, 3 runways and many large unique planes flying in and out on a regular basis- this little town was sworn to secrecy. All in a massive effort to conceal and protect the location of this TOP SECRET AF base. But what made it so special was the object that was being so heavily protected was the Nordon Bombsight, the prize piece of the American’s upper hand in the Battle of the Coral Sea….. And not even the base soldiers knew it was there – Just Incredible!
Bilby Rescue Centre
Bilby Rescue was initiated by a couple of guys by the name of Frank Manthey and Peter McRae, whose passion to rescue these tiny marsupials from certain extinction is something of an absolute wonder. They created an organisation called Save the Bilby Fund in 1999 and what has occurred from their early work has been areas set aside for the Bilbies to safely re-populate their species.
The Bilby Fence at Currawinya National Park was designed to protect bilbies from feral animals and predators to enable them to live and breed in safety. It opened in 2003 and cost $500,000 to build the 25sq km electrified predator-exclusion fence. Save the Bilby breed and release captive bilbies to a sanctuary surrounded by a predator exclusion fence in Currawinya National Park with the aim of building a population of 400 free-living bilbies; and it’s working.
Summing up…
- Accommodation – Bailey Bar Caravan Park (07) 4654 1744
- Cost per night – $34.20 (@ 27-Jul-2022)Stayed for – 3 nights
- Facilities – Very old and really need some sprucing up
- CP Location – 196 King St Charleville
- CP map – couldn’t find one 😢
- WikiCamps – follow this link
- Our rating/score – 7/10 despite the negative reviews on WikiCamps we actually liked this park
- Was it a nice town to visit? – yes – typical outback town with lots of friendly locals
- Activities & places of interest – plenty to see and do here. A great place to visit
- Tourist info centre? – Charleville Visitor Information Centre (07) 4656 8359
- Would we return? – yes – but a long way from Victoria
- We rate the town – 8/10
- Overall thoughts – Loved our stay here and were also happy with the accommodation.
