Qualla: Isisford, Queensland

Isisford, Queensland: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Barry Merrick from Mount Isa, Australia, CC BY 2.0. A dry creek bed near a town of barely 200 people turned out to hold the missing link in crocodile evolution. In the mid-1990s, Isisford's former deputy mayor, Ian Duncan, found fossil bones weathering out of the cracked earth on the western Queensland plains. They belonged to a small, sharp-snouted reptile that swam the inland seas about 98 million years ago - and that, scientists later realised, sat astonishingly close to the ancestor of every crocodile, alligator, and gharial living today. They named it Isisfordia duncani, after the town and the man who found it. Few places this small have given their name to so large a chapter of natural history.

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Image: Barry Merrick from Mount Isa, Australia | CC BY 2.0

Isisford, Queensland: The Crocodile That Came First

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kgbo, CC BY-SA 4.0. Isisfordia duncani was about 1.1 metres long, no monster, but evolutionarily it was a giant. Recovered from the Cretaceous Winton Formation, it is one of the most primitive members of the lineage that gave rise to all modern crocodilians - the closest thing yet found to their com...

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Image: Kgbo | CC BY-SA 4.0

Isisford, Queensland: On the Outer Barcoo

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carole Mackinney, FAL. The Barcoo River curls past the town, and that name carries weight in Australian letters. Banjo Paterson spent time in this country, and the flat, churchless distances fed his verse. "A Bush Christening" opens "On the outer Barcoo where the churches are few, / And men of religion...

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Image: Carole Mackinney | FAL

Isisford, Queensland: A Ford on the Barcoo

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The name is a knot of history. The Indigenous people of this region are the Kuungkari, who lived along the river when Thomas Mitchell's expedition passed through in September 1846, describing a large camp of permanent huts and well-worn paths. The town that grew here was first ca...

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Image: Public domain

Isisford, Queensland: Small Town, Long Memory

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Olszewski, CC BY-SA 4.0. Isisford has never held more than about 300 people, yet its footnotes keep surprising you. In April 1910 it became the first town in Australia served by motorised mail, the cars running 90 kilometres from Ilfracombe to the north; a plaque on the post office still marks it. The 18...

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Image: Chris Olszewski | CC BY-SA 4.0