This singled-storeyed sandstone building is thought to have been erected circa 1883 as the Royal Hotel, Birdsville.
Although European explorers had passed through the Diamantina district in the 1840s and early 1860s, pastoralists did not occupy this semi-arid region until the mid-1870s when a number of runs were established. In the early 1880s the towns of Birdsville and Bedourie were established to service the newly taken up pastoral holdings of the Diamantina. Birdsville is reputed to have sprung up around a rough depot constructed by general merchant Matthew Flynn in the late 1870s at the site of the present town. It was then known as the Diamantina Crossing and was on the stock route from Boulia south to Adelaide. By mid-1885, when the township of Birdsville was officially surveyed, a number of buildings had already been erected including a police lock-up (1883), Groth's Royal Hotel (1883), Blair's Birdsville Hotel (1883), Curtain's Tattersalls Hotel, and at least 3 stores and a shop. Diamantina Shire was established in 1883, and its headquarters were at Birdsville until moved to Bedourie in 1953.
The name Birdsville was not adopted until the 1885 survey, and is thought to have been suggested by Robert Frew, owner of Pandie Pandie Station, who also had a store and shop at the Diamantina Crossing, in reference to the profuse bird life of the district. The township, over 1,000 miles west of Brisbane and 7 miles north of the Queensland-South Australian border, developed as an administrative centre for police and border customs. Nearly all the trade of the town was with Adelaide, and it became an important marshalling point for cattle being driven south to markets in South Australia. By 1889 the population of Birdsville was 110, and the town had 2 general stores, 3 hotels, a police station, school, 2 blacksmith shops, 2 bakers, a cordial manufacturer, bootmaker, saddler, auctioneer & commission agent, and a number of residences. The population peaked in 1895 at 220.
Almost all the buildings in the town were of local sandstone, there being no local timber available. Distance and the lack of good access roads or a railway created prohibitively high transportation costs, so imported building materials were kept to a minimum. Architecturally, the old stone buildings of Birdsville reflect the associations of the town with the entire central "strip" of the Australian continent. Similar buildings are found as far south as Robe in South Australia and as far north as Boulia in Queensland. They are of significance for their illustration of a vernacular style that spread throughout central Australia, across South Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland. The origin of the style is unknown, but the architectural characteristics are immediately identifiable: built of locally quarried stone with wide verandahs, they efficiently control the extremes of temperature in the hot arid interior of the continent.
The earliest section of the Royal Hotel is likely to have been constructed in 1883, as the first license for this hotel was issued to Alfred William Tucker in that year. In 1885 Tucker transferred the license to Johann H Groth, and on the official survey plan of 1885, the building is marked as Groth's hotel. On the 25th of January 1886, Groth secured his holding by the purchase of the allotment on which the hotel was located, for £260, and the unimproved allotment adjoining this to the south, for £10. Each block comprised 2 roods. Title to both blocks passed from Groth in 1898, but the building continued to function as an hotel under several proprietors and licensees until the early 1920s. Mrs Alice Maude Scott was the licensee and later owner from 1908 until at least 1920, when title passed to Harry Afford, station manager of Birdsville.
From 1923 to 1937, the Royal Hotel buildings were leased by the Presbyterian Australian Inland Mission (AIM) as their first bush nursing home, or hostel. It was staffed by two nursing sisters, the first two arriving in September 1923. At that time the main building consisted of 6 rooms and was unfurnished. A 1926 photograph shows that parts of two walls of a stone shed at the rear of the hostel had collapsed by this date, and was nicknamed the 'Hole in the Wall Hospital Store'. A 1927 photograph shows an old shed of corrugated-iron also at the rear of the main hostel building.
At that period the AIM was headed by the Rev. Dr John Flynn, who was working toward establishing a flying doctor and air ambulance service for remote central Australia. Such a service could only operate efficiently if it could be contacted quickly, so Flynn experimented with radio as a means of communicating between isolated station properties, the Mission's string of bush hostels (ultimately 13), and the flying doctor/air ambulance. In 1925 he undertook various radio experiments throughout central Australia, including an early attempt at receiving/transmitting from the AIM Hostel in Birdsville. However, it was not until 1929, with Alfred Traeger's invention of the pedal radio, that reliable radio communications were possible for the bush. In September 1929, Traeger installed at the AIM's Birdsville Hostel one of 6 experimental 'transceivers' linked to pedal generators, the others being placed at 4 head stations in far western Queensland and at the Aboriginal Mission at Mornington Island, with base station VJI established at Cloncurry. For the first 18 months, communication was by Morse code, but the system proved enormously popular, and soon revolutionised outback communications. Importantly, Birdsville became reliably connected to the station properties in the Diamantina district, and with the new Aerial Medical Service, established by Flynn in 1928 under the auspices of the AIM, and based at Cloncurry.
In 1934, nursing sisters Edna McLean and Amy Bishop of the AIM's Birdsville Hostel introduced a system of early morning radio calls to the station women in the Diamantina district who had access to radio. It proved highly popular, and although indecorously dubbed the 'Galah Session', is credited with being Australia's first radio talk-back program. Birdsville VKK became the 'Voice of the Diamantina Country'. In 1937 the AIM relinquished the former Royal Hotel premises in Birdsville and moved to a new, purpose-designed hostel just down the road. The old sandstone building was subsequently used for residential purposes, then abandoned, and later partially collapsed. Some restoration work was carried out in 1984, when sections of the collapsed walls were partly reconstructed. Further substantial stabilisation and restoration work was undertaken in 1994.
Source: Queensland Heritage Register.
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