EZTrip.com International Destination Guide and Hotel Listings

Straddling the Tropic of Capricorn, 100km north of Gladstone, ROCKHAMPTON was founded after a false goldrush in 1858 left hundreds of miners stranded at a depot 40km inland on the banks of the sluggish Fitzroy River ; their rough camp below Mount Archer was adopted by local stockmen as a convenient port. The iron trelliswork and sandstone buildings fronting the river recall the balmy 1890s, when money was pouring into the city from central Queensland's prosperous cattle industry and the gold and copper mines 40km west at Mount Morgan . Today, however, despite hosting a large university campus, Rockhampton feels a bit despondent: the mines have closed (though before they did, they managed to fund the fledgling BP company), the beef industry is down in the dumps and the summers, unrelieved by coastal breezes, are appallingly humid. Bearing this in mind, the city is best seen as a springboard for the adjacent Capricorn Coast, but with half a day to spare it's worth catching the Aboriginal version of history at the Dreamtime Centre ; and there are a group of limestone caves to the north to poke around in.