The town of
Ilfracombe, with one hotel and Folk Museum had in the 1890s three hotels each with its own dance hall, a soft drink maker, a coach builder, two general stores, a billiard saloon, a dressmaker, three commission agents, a couple of butchers, a baker and a saddler.
Today there are just 350 people living in a shire which covers an area of 6500 sq. km. The old stations where anything up to 100 people were employed are now a thing of the past. Back in1892 Wellshot Station (60 km south of town) was the largest sheep station in the world, in terms of the number of sheep it ran: 460 000. Indeed, so predominant was it that
Ilfracombe was, until 1890, known as Wellshot.
Another record claimed by the shire is that of the largest mob of sheep ever moved as a single flock. In 1886 43 000 sheep were moved through the area by a droving team of 27 horsemen - and that doesn't include the cooks, blacksmiths and hands which would have been needed to accompany the drovers. The era of the large wagon hauls was ended by the arrival of the railway in 1891, making
Ilfracombe a railhead for the transportation of regional livestock to urban markets.
The changing of the times is apparent in another historical landmark associated with the town, when, in 1910, it became part of the first motorised postal service in Australia, from
Ilfracombe to
Isisford.
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Located just 27 km east of
Longreach, on the Landsborough Hwy.
The huge properties which once dominated the area have been broken up into smaller units. Despite the changes of the last century
Ilfracombe still survives as a service centre to the surrounding sheep and cattle stations. It possesses such facilities as a swimming
pool, a 14-hole golf course, tennis, rugby league, and clay target clubs, a
recreation centre, a racecourse, an hotel, a store, a
post office, a school and a caravan park..
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In 1988 Peter
Forrest was commissioned to write a history of the shire. The result 'A Rush for Grass' is much more than a local history.
Things to see at
Ilfracombe are the
Ilfracombe Machinery and
Heritage Museum
The Museum, situated on the northern side of the main road, provides an insight into this past with its displays of an old police lock-up used between 1901 and 1974, a meat house, the old manual
post office exchange, a machinery shed with steam engines, tractors, pumps, graders, trucks, drays, buggies, a 100-million year-old petrified palm, curious natural
limestone rocks with a remarkably rounded form, along with other interesting artefacts and memorabilia. One of the old wagons possessed by the museum was once in local use. It was drawn by 20 or 30 horses and carted about 100 bales of wool (weighing 15 to 20 tons) to sea ports such as
Bowen or
Rockhampton, a six-month return journey.
The museum has been built in the style of an old station
homestead. It is open permanently with no entry charge, and the
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Wellshot Hotel dating from 1890, the front section remains largelt unaltered, though the accommodation wing to the rear was rebuilt in 1956. The interior contains memorabilia from the height of the wool-station era.
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