Tour Audio a Townsville

Castle Hill rises 286 metres from the centre of Townsville, a red granite monolith that you can see from almost anywhere in the city. In March 1962, seven university students painted a white stick figure on the northern face of the rock as a prank. They called it 'The Saint.' Attempts to remove it failed, public opinion turned in its favour, and in 1993 the Queensland Heritage Register declared it an official heritage landmark. The Saint has now been there for sixty years and is repainted periodically with civic approval. This is how Townsville operates: unconventionally, with a certain stubbornness about things it has decided to keep.

Flinders Street, the oldest street in the city, has a run of nineteenth-century commercial buildings in iron-lace and queenslander style that survived the Queensland heritage lottery better than most northern towns.

The post office from 1886 keeps its clock tower. The Great Northern Hotel from 1901 still has the broad verandah balconies that the climate demands. The tropical savanna climate means nine months of dry weather and then a wet season that can deliver extraordinary amounts of rain: on January 11, 1998, 548.8 millimetres fell in twelve hours, which local memory records as 'the Night of Noah.'