Summary

This photograph depicts a gold escort from the Bank of New South Wales in Georgetown, Queensland in the early 1900s. Boxes of gold were loaded into carriages, which were then escorted by police and armed horsemen, most likely to Croydon. This escort's gold would have been mined from the Etheridge and Oaks goldfields. Gold escorts like this one were linked to all of Queensland's goldfields in the late 1800s. However, they began to disappear as mining railways proliferated throughout the region during the late 1800s and early 1900s. By 1908, the Etheridge and Oaks goldfields were the only major Queensland mineral fields without an established railway nearby, making this Georgetown-Croydon escort the only gold escort remaining in Queensland at the time.

This branch of the Bank of New South Wales was located on St. George Street and was housed in an elevated timber building with exterior vertical tongue-and-groove panelled walls. The pyramid-shaped corrugated iron roof and the timber "crossed" balustrading lining the verandah are extremely common among buildings constructed in North Queensland from 1860-1900.

Georgetown is located roughly 400 kilometres south-west of Cairns and 145 kilometres east of Croydon. Originally named Etheridge in 1869, the town was renamed Georgetown in 1871, in honour of a gold commissioner from Gilberton, Howard St. George. The rural town is the administrative centre of the Etheridge Shire and lies along the Etheridge River. The Etheridge Shire was over 38,000 km2 and included the townships and goldfields of Cumberland, Georgetown, Charleston and Einasleigh. Due to the sporadic nature of the ore and the difficulties in mining it efficiently, goldfields in the Etheridge Shire were often designated "poor man's fields," even though well over 500,000 oz. of gold was reportedly mined there by the start of the First World War.

The photographs in this collection were taken by the Reverend Frederic Charles Hall (1878-1926) during the period 1902-1909 when he was the Anglican Curate appointed to Georgetown in North Queensland. Hall's foremost hobby was photography. He used both a half-plate camera with tripod made by J. Lancaster & Son, Birmingham and a quarter-plate Austral No. 3 made by the Australian company, Baker & Rouse. Glass negatives from Ilford and Austral were used; developing was done by the photographer himself and printing by exposure to sunlight.