Qualla: Collinsville, Queensland

Collinsville, Queensland: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The land knew it held coal long before the surveyors did. The people who lived here first, speakers of Biri, called this place Moongunya, a name that translates roughly as the place of coal. They were right about what lay beneath the dry inland hills west of Bowen, though it would be European hands and a long century of unions, strikes and disasters that turned that knowledge into the town of Collinsville. Today around fifteen hundred people live here, and the place still introduces itself the way it always has: by what it digs out of the ground, and by the people who do the digging.

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Image: Public domain

Collinsville, Queensland: Place of Coal

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian Sutton from Collinsville and Oberon, Australia, CC BY 2.0. Biri, sometimes written Birri, is an Aboriginal language whose country reaches across Central and North Queensland, taking in the land around Bowen, Ayr, Nebo and Collinsville. The Biri name for this spot, Moongunya, recorded what mattered most about it. Europeans arrived from 18...

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Image: Ian Sutton from Collinsville and Oberon, Australia | CC BY 2.0

Collinsville, Queensland: A Union Town

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian Sutton from Oberon, Australia, CC BY 2.0. Collinsville became, and remains, a union town in the deepest sense, where the labour movement is not an abstraction but the spine of community life. Coal is dangerous, demanding work, and the men who did it organised early and held together hard. When the Collinsville State Coal...

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Image: Ian Sutton from Oberon, Australia | CC BY 2.0

Collinsville, Queensland: The Day the Air Vanished

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian Sutton from Oberon, Australia, CC BY 2.0. On 13 October 1954, in the deepest reach of the No. 1 tunnel about a kilometre and a half underground, a sudden outburst dislodged some 900 tonnes of earth and released a flood of nearly pure carbon dioxide. Seven men died where they worked, smothered as the gas drove out the air...

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Image: Ian Sutton from Oberon, Australia | CC BY 2.0

Collinsville, Queensland: Wharrier and Mr Ed

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian Sutton from Collinsville and Oberon, Australia, CC BY 2.0. Not every Collinsville story ends underground. For most of the twentieth century, sturdy ponies hauled the coal in the mines here, and by the late 1980s the very last working pit ponies in Australia, named Wharrier and Mr Ed, were still going down at Collinsville Coal's No. 2 Min...

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Image: Ian Sutton from Collinsville and Oberon, Australia | CC BY 2.0

Collinsville, Queensland: The Pony in the Square

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Greditdesu, CC BY-SA 4.0. Collinsville chose to remember that story the way it remembers its dead, by building something permanent. In November 2015, to mark twenty-five years since Wharrier and Mr Ed were retired, the town unveiled a life-size bronze pit pony in its centre. The community paid for it them...

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Image: Greditdesu | CC BY-SA 4.0