Sheep farming was the major rural industry that developed in the Barcaldine district dating back to the 1840s. It was the sheep men who followed in the footsteps of the various expeditionists who had discovered the good pasture of the western plains, Sir Thomas Mitchell being the first. The Queensland Land Act of 1860 allowed settlers to take up runs of 50 to 100 square miles with no limit to the number that could be acquired by one owner, so a land scramble ensued, with vast tracts of land taken up, with fourteen year leases granted to settlers if they stocked to within one quarter of carrying capacity within one year. The stock, course, was sheep. Lease holders did not necessarily live on their land and some runs were never formally leased.
We shouldn’t forget that the Mitchell district was a frontier, and the law was a formality, impossible to enforce in the early days. Clashes with the natives were not documented but the natives and their culture were soon destroyed, ensuring that the descendants of the Iningai people have to attempt to piece together their heritage and culture from what has remained.
The first settlers in the area of whom records exist were J. T. Allen of Enniskillen to the south and John Rule and Dyson Lacy of Aramac Station to the north. In 1863, Donald Cameron, his son John, and James and William Crombie overlanded sheep from the New England district of NSW and pastured them along a forty mile frontage to the Alice River. READ MORE
In more recent times, some sheep properties have changed to cattle runs.
Other agricultural industries around Barcaldine have come and gone – citrus orchards, date farms, the Alice River Co-operative.
In 1934, to help the district, local MLA Frank Bulcock, persuaded the State Government to establish a new industry – a plantation of date palms at the site of the old Alice River Co-operative Settlement. The palms did well, but finding a profitable market, and harvesting the dates before fire or birds destroyed them proved impossible. A bird sanctuary established there in 1938 did little to help. In 1945 Barcaldine Council was asked to take over the date farm.
