Qualla: Bladensburg National Park

Bladensburg National Park: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ben Cordia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Surprise Creek is dry most of the year, a pale ribbon of sand winding between the jump-ups south of Winton. Follow it far enough into Bladensburg National Park and you reach a quiet, shaded waterhole that the country knows by a harder name: Skull Hole. In the 1870s, somewhere in this landscape, settlers and Native Police killed a large number of Aboriginal people, and for generations afterward bones lay among the rocks. The place is preserved now, not as a tourist curiosity but as a site of remembrance, a reminder that the wide outback calm of this park was won at a cost that the Koa people have never forgotten.

Image: Ben Cordia | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bladensburg National Park: Koa Country

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Uwe Dedering, CC BY-SA 3.0. This is the homeland of the Koa people, who lived across the Winton district long before any sheep arrived. In 2021 the Federal Court of Australia formally recognised the Koa as native title holders over some 31,400 square kilometres of country taking in Winton and its surrounds,...

Image: Uwe Dedering | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bladensburg National Park: The Weight of Skull Hole

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Tann from Sydney, Australia, CC BY 2.0. The massacre at Skull Hole sits at the centre of that history, and it must be told plainly. Sometime in the 1870s, in one of the frontier killings that swept pastoral Queensland, a group of Aboriginal people camped near this waterhole were attacked and killed; a contemporary repo...

Image: John Tann from Sydney, Australia | CC BY 2.0

Bladensburg National Park: A Working Station's Bones

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ben Cordia, CC BY-SA 4.0. European pastoralists took up this country to run sheep, and the marks of that enterprise remain. The original Bladensburg homestead, thought to have been moved to its present spot around the 1910s, still stands and now serves as the park's visitor information centre, its timber ...

Image: Ben Cordia | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bladensburg National Park: Plains, Jump-Ups and Mesas

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ben Cordia, CC BY-SA 4.0. The land itself is classic central-western Queensland: open Mitchell-grass downs rolling to the horizon, broken by river flats and by the sandstone ranges and flat-topped mesas, the jump-ups, that rise abruptly from the plain. The park straddles two bioregions, mostly the Goneawa...

Image: Ben Cordia | CC BY-SA 4.0