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Once Queensland's second-largest city, and often referred to in its heyday simply as "the World", CHARTERS TOWERS is a showcase of colonial era architecture. An Aboriginal boy named Jupiter Mosman found gold here in 1871 and within twelve months three thousand prospectors had stripped the landscape of trees and covered it with shafts, chimneys and crushing mills. At first, little money was reinvested - the cemetery is a sad record of cholera and typhoid outbreaks from poor sanitation - but by 1900, despite diminishing returns, Charters Towers had become a prosperous centre. There's been minimal change since then and the population, now mainly sustained by cattle farming, has shrunk to about a third of what it was in its prime. Good times to visit are for the May Day weekend Country Music Festival , and the Easter Rodeo .

Just about every building on Gill and Mosman streets catches the eye: a brightly painted police station, the classical elegance of the post office, and the shaded country arcades outside the stores. The courtyard and glass roof at the former Stock Exchange and Assayer's Office now front some quiet shops and a lifeless mining museum (daily 9am-4pm; $3). Next door, the solid facade of the town hall betrays its original purpose as a bank, which stored gold bars smelted locally; and the next bank along is now a grand facade for The World Theatre and Cinemas. Just down Mosman Street is the Zara Clark Museum (daily 10am-3pm; $3), housing an absorbing jumble of everything from old wagons to a set of silver tongs for eating frogs' legs. Further along the road there's plenty of shade under giant fig trees at Lissner Park , whose Boer War memorial recalls stories of Breaker Morant , a local poet executed by the British after shooting a prisoner.

The Venus Gold Battery , 5km out of town down Gill Street (tours daily 10am & 2pm; $3), is a fascinating illustration of the monumental efforts needed to separate gold from rock. Abandoned in 1972 after a century of operations, the battery is a huge, gloomy temple to the past, its machinery lying silent and piecemeal around the place. The intention is to restore it to full working order, presumably without re-creating the actual conditions - it was a hideous place, a sweatbox filled with noxious fumes and noise. Ore was ground to a powder in one of the seven massive crushers, mixed with water and passed over a mercury screen. Any gold formed an amalgam and adhered to the mercury, which was then heated in a crucible to leave a pitted nugget and later re-melted with flux to absorb any impurities. Sludge from the mercury screens was soaked in cyanide to leach out more gold, and then the cyanide was neutralized with sulphur and piled up outside. These mounds are now being reprocessed using modern methods to extract the last vestiges of the precious metal.