page_title: Aramac, Queensland
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Aramac, Queensland / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo Taken and Supplied by Brian Voon Yee Yap. A white bull statue in Aramac. This bull was stolen by cattle thieves and taken to Adelaide.
context_page_description: Aramac is a rural town and locality in the Barcaldine Region, Queensland, Australia. In the 2016 census, Aramac had a population of 299 people.
context_section_description: Aramac lay on the traditional tribal lands of the Iningai. Iningai (also known as Yiningay, Muttaburra, Tateburra, Yinangay, Yinangi) is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken by the Iningai people. The Iningai language region includes the landscape within the local government boundaries of the Longreach Region and Barcaldine Region, particularly the towns of Longreach, Barcaldine, Muttaburra and Aramac as well as the properties of Bowen Downs and catchments of Cornish Creek and Alice River.
  In the 1850s, pastoralist and future Premier of Queensland Robert Ramsey Mackenzie travelled through the area, which was on the traditional lands of the Iningai. He blazed a tree with the inscription 'R R Mac', which was later corrupted into the name of the town. William Landsborough also explored the area in 1859. Pastoral occupation began in 1862 on the Bowen Downs station on Reedy Creek, north of Aramac, and the Aramac Station (1863).
  In 1867 an employee of Aramac Station, John William Kingston, opened a bark-hut store at an outlying point on the Aramac Creek. Enlarged two years later to include a hotel (Kingston's Bazaar), Kingston's settlement was declared a town site in 1869 and surveyed as a town in 1875. It was the region's first town, and the centre of the first local-government division. To this day John William Kingston is recognised as the original founder of Aramac. His grave bears a plaque in the Aramac Cemetery acknowledging his achievement.
  
  The town was originally called Marathon. The name was changed to that of Aramac, after the station, when the survey was conducted in 1875. Recollections of an 1878 visit to Aramac were published in the Rockhampton Morning Bulletin in 1933, describing the township as consisting of "neat weatherboard structures, painted, and comprising four stores, three hotels, and three butchers' shops, with a post office, bank, court house, and surgery", and the surrounding countryside and as  "one of the emporia of the West."
  "The place is known to so many by name only that the visitor feels himself travelled. Moreover, he has become, acquainted, however slightly, with the great western country, of which we have all heard so much. "He has been on its threshold, having traversed the desert, and beheld, not without surprise, broad rolling downs stretching away to the horizon, with an open landscape, sparsely mottled with trees, the whole presenting a vivid contrast to the dense scrub and scanty herbage of some of the more easterly districts. He has, in a word, seen an oasis in the 'Sahara' -one which, to him, has a beginning, but is boundless on the western side. Besides this, if the visit has been made during Show week, he has come more, fully to appreciate the great pastoral interest, as represented in the persons of men of intelligence and energy -the pioneers of colonisation, the promoters of commerce."
  Little is known about the original indigenous population, although there was a reported massacre of 25 local Aborigines at the nearby Mailman's Gorge. This event remained largely unknown until the publication of North Queensland Pioneers in 1932. The author stated:
  "The indigenous people were very numerous in the ranges around Aramac in the early days and the murder of a travelling jeweller and his wife and child caused reprisals. Harried by the police, the offending tribe took refuge in the country of a hostile tribe, and this precipitated wholesale tribal warfare. To this day it is said the mountain caves yield skeletons, the result of this tribal war."
  An 1865 account said the death of a shepherd or a government employee at Stainburn Downs station, north-west of Aramac, led to a revenge attack by squatters. Three Europeans are supposed to have tracked 30 Aborigines to a cave at Mailman's Gorge and shot them.
  In 1870, Henry 'Harry' Redford duffed cattle from a property called Bowen Downs. He amassed a herd of about 1,000 cattle. Knowing that the Bowen Downs cattle brand would be recognised locally, Redford knew he could not sell them locally, so decided to drive the cattle overland to South
caption: White Bull statue, commemorating Harry Redford's cattle duffing
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