Kajabbi is a rural town in the

locality Locality may refer to: * Locality, a historical named location or place in Canada * Locality (association), an association of community regeneration organizations in England * Locality (linguistics) * Locality (settlement) * Suburbs and localitie ...

of Three Rivers,

Shire of Cloncurry The Shire of Cloncurry is a Local government in Australia, local government area in North West Queensland, Australia. It covers an area of , and has existed as a local government entity since 1884. The major town and administrative centre of the ...

Queensland Queensland ( , commonly abbreviated as Qld) is a States and territories of Australia, state in northeastern Australia, and is the second-largest and third-most populous state in Australia. It is bordered by the Northern Territory, South Austr ...

, Australia.

Geography

The town is on the

Leichhardt River The Leichhardt River is a river in north-west Queensland, Australia. Course The source of the river is in the Selwyn Range under Rifle Creek Hill and fed by Rifle Creek approximately south of the mining town Mount Isa. It runs in a generally n ...

in the remote north-west of Queensland, north west of the state capital

Brisbane Brisbane ( ; ) is the List of Australian capital cities, capital and largest city of the States and territories of Australia, state of Queensland and the list of cities in Australia by population, third-most populous city in Australia, with a ...

. The town is small, described by a travel writer as "no more than a pub and a couple of houses". The Kalkadoon Hotel is the only commercial business in the town.

History

The town takes its name from the former Kajabbi railway station, which was named by

Queensland Railways Department Queensland Rail (QR) is a railway operator in Queensland, Australia. Queensland Rail is owned by the Queensland Government, and operates both suburban and interurban rail services in South East Queensland, as well as long-distance passenger t ...

on 29 April 1915. It is reportedly an Aboriginal word, meaning '' kite hawk''. Nearby Battle Mountain was the scene of an armed conflict between local

Kalkadoon people The Kalkadoon (properly Kalkatungu) are descendants of an Indigenous Australian tribe living in the Mount Isa region of Queensland. Their ancestral tribe has been called "the elite of the Aboriginal warriors of Queensland". In 1884 they were mas ...

and European cattlemen supported by the armed forces. Many of the local Aborigines were killed. Kajabbi State School opened on 15 September 1919 and closed on 28 January 1975. In the 1920s, Kajabbi was a service centre for nearby copper mines at Dobbyn and Mount Cuthbert. The town was a railhead on the

Mount Cuthbert and Dobbyn railway lines Mount Cuthbert is 100 kilometres north-west of Cloncurry, Queensland. It was once a copper mining town, booming in 1918, when Pugh's Almanac Queensland Directory estimated Mount Cuthbert's population at 750. It recorded six boarding houses, ...

and cattle from a wide area of north west Queensland were brought to the town to be railed to

Cloncurry Cloncurry is a rural town and locality in the Shire of Cloncurry, Queensland, Australia. It is informally known by local people as The Curry. Cloncurry is the administrative centre of the Shire of Cloncurry. Cloncurry is known as the ''Friendl ...

and onwards. Kajabbi Post Office opened on 13 June 1927 (a

receiving office A post office is a public facility and a retailer that provides mail services, such as accepting letters and parcels, providing post office boxes, and selling postage stamps, packaging, and stationery. Post offices may offer additional serv ...

had been open from 1917) and closed in 1973. In 2009, the Kalkadoon Hotel closed citing problems with meeting regulatory requirements.

Heritage listings

Kajabbi has a number of

heritage-listed This list is of heritage registers, inventories of cultural properties, natural and human-made, tangible and intangible, movable and immovable, that are deemed to be of sufficient heritage value to be separately identified and recorded. In ma ...

sites, including: * North-West of Kajabbi Township:

Mount Cuthbert Township and Smelter Mount Cuthbert Township and Smelter is a heritage-listed mining camp north-west of Kajabbi Township, Three Rivers, Queensland, Three Rivers, Shire of Cloncurry, Queensland, Australia. It was built from to . It is also known as Kalkadoon Mine & ...

References

External links

* {{authority control Towns in Queensland Shire of Cloncurry