Qualla: Boulia Stone House https://qualla.com/boulia-stone-house en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:28 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/r/5/g/m/boulia-stone-house-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Boulia Stone House https://qualla.com/boulia-stone-house Boulia Stone House: Introduction https://qualla.com/boulia-stone-house/ Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. Almost nothing in Boulia is made of stone. The town that grew on the bank of the Burke River was a place of canvas, then timber, then corrugated iron, materials you could cart in and throw up fast against the heat. So the cottage on the corner of Pituri and Hamilton Streets is an anomaly: thick walls of honey-coloured sandstone and limestone, quarried from a ridge nearby and laid by three stonemasons who came all the way from Armidale in New South Wales. They worked for roughly four years, somewhere in the early 1880s, and according to local tradition they used no nails at all. More than a century later, it is the only stone building left standing in town.

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Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/r/5/g/m/boulia-stone-house-wp/r5gm-boulia-stone-house-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Boulia Stone House: Built to Last in a Place That Wasn't https://qualla.com/boulia-stone-house/ Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. The Stone House went up just as Boulia was finding its feet. A store had opened on the Boulia Waterhole in 1877, a town reserve was proclaimed in 1879, and the surveyors arrived in 1882. By 1891 the directories listed Boulia as a pastoral town of a hundred and fifty souls, with a...

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Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/r/5/g/m/boulia-stone-house-wp/r5gm-boulia-stone-house-built-to-last-in-a-place-that-wasnt.mp3 0:06 2 full Boulia Stone House: The Jones Family Cottage https://qualla.com/boulia-stone-house/ Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. Local tradition holds that the house was built for James Edward Jones, a storekeeper in the firm of Burnell and Jones. The records are tangled in a way that suits a frontier town: Jones did not actually purchase the block until 1897, and there is a theory the building started lif...

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Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/r/5/g/m/boulia-stone-house-wp/r5gm-boulia-stone-house-the-jones-family-cottage.mp3 0:06 3 full Boulia Stone House: Random Rubble and a Hidden Cellar https://qualla.com/boulia-stone-house/ Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. The craftsmanship is plain and honest. The external walls are laid as random rubble, roughly coursed and neatly squared at the corners and around the openings, the lime mortar slowly stained by the region's red sand. A core of four stone rooms opens through glazed French doors on...

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Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/r/5/g/m/boulia-stone-house-wp/r5gm-boulia-stone-house-random-rubble-and-a-hidden-cellar.mp3 0:06 4 full Boulia Stone House: A Museum, and the Town's Strange Glowing Mystery https://qualla.com/boulia-stone-house/ Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. Since the mid-1980s the cottage has served as Boulia's museum, its rooms filled with the saddlery, machinery and surgical instruments of early outback life, alongside a striking display of marine fossils from a time when this desert lay beneath an inland sea. The Stone House anch...

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Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/r/5/g/m/boulia-stone-house-wp/r5gm-boulia-stone-house-a-museum-and-the-towns-strange-glowing-mystery.mp3 0:06 5 full