Bark shanties and tents popped up overnight to supply miners with the essentials of flour, booze and meat.

Shanty settlements grew into more permanent towns with the establishment of more substantial government buildings, pubs, parlours and stores.

Remnants of many long-forgotten towns that once boasted their own post offices, pubs, brothels and gambling houses lie waiting to be rediscovered.

Now, 150 years after the rush, actual buildings and anything useful is long gone but the evidence of once-thriving towns can still be found in remote corners of Far North Queensland.

The following is an (incomplete) list of ghost towns around Cairns and how to find them.

MAYTOWN

About 120km southwest of Cooktown at the end of road that traverses a seemingly never-ending series of rolling mountains lies Maytown.

Known as Edwardstown until 1878, Maytown was founded in 1874 when payable alluvial gold was discovered at the Palmer River by James Mulligan in 1873.

During its peak in 1876 the town boasted 12 hotels, six stores, three bakers and three tobacconists.

A year later it’s estimated there were 19,500 inhabitants of the town living and working on the field.

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At the turn of the century the town had a branch of the Queensland Government Savings Bank, a state school, courthouse, school of arts, a hospital and police barracks.

By 1879, 30 tonnes of gold had been officially taken from the field, mainly from alluvial deposits.

In 2004 the goldfield was gazetted as a historical reserve by the state government and removal of historic relics forbidden.

Today not much is left.

Stone guttering along the main street and plaques erected by the Palmer River Historic Preservation Society reveal the names of business that traded from the main drag.

A replica miner’s hut has been erected by the society and is filled with long forgotten artefacts of the era.

From Maytown it’s a short drive to other reef mining sites, many of which hide old mining equipment too heavy to cart out when the gold ran out.

To find Maytown, take Whites Creek Road off the Mulligan Highway and follow it for about 60km through some of the roughest country of Cape York.

SILVER VALLEY

Soon after the early Palmer River gold rush, prospector and bushman James Mulligan discovered silver on the Atherton Tablelands west of Ravenshoe.

In 1880 payable silver was found on the Wild River and by 1883 mining operations began to extract silver, lead and galena.

While the silver mines were initially productive, after a few years the silver lode was exhausted and mines abandoned.

Tin was later discovered in the area but by 1910 that deposit also ran out.

In 1910 there was a hotel called the Silver Valley Hotel and a school in the area had enough local children to sustain operation until 1934.

To find abandoned mining equipment on the banks of the Wild River head west from Ravenshoe and turn right onto Silver Valley Road just before Innot Hot Springs.

Alternatively turn onto the same road from the north from the Herberton Petford Road and old mining equipment is visible from the road on the right hand side.

Also of interest is an ancient indigenous cave art painted on a huge cliff overhang a short walk off the dirt road.

BYERSTOWN

Another settlement on the banks of the Palmer River about 80km southwest of Cooktown is Byerstown.

Johnny Byers and Billy Little were well known on the Maytown goldfield and founded a butcher’s shop near where the Mulligan Highway crosses the river today.

Following the opening of the road from the coast to Maytown, Byerstown boomed to offer three hotels, twice as many unlicensed shanties about 10 stores of various kinds and a Chinese doctor.

In 1882 the Australian Handbook recorded four hotels, 13 stores, a police barracks, two butchers and a blacksmith.

Described as the emporium for the Palmer Goldfield, it was estimated that three-quarters of goods consumed on the Hodgkinson and Palmer river fields passed through Byerstown.

Later the town served as a base for reef miners who chose to abandon the Palmer goldfield to seek their fortune at the Hodgkinson River reef deposits.

By 1903 Byerstown was reduced to two Chinese stores.

Its population according to the 1881 census was 701.

Nothing was recorded in later censuses, until 1933 when 263 people were counted, many of whom were unemployed because of the Great Depression.

To find the old settlement of Byerstown turn left off the Mulligan Highway (heading north) just after the Palmer River Roadhouse.

The old town site is about 5km down a dirt road on the northern bank of the Palmer River.

OLD SMITHFIELD

Before the Smithfield we know today, the original settlement was located on the banks of the Barron River in present day Caravonica.

The town was named after William (Old Bill) Smith who was the first to find a route from the goldfields to Trinity Bay.

The short-lived settlement was described as the “wickedest” town in all Australia before cyclone and flooding of the Barron River wiped the settlement off the map in 1879.

A hotbed of drinking, violence and debauchery, sudden death and the threat of it was very familiar to Old Smithfield inhabitants.

In a short space of time following an earlier cyclone in 1877, Bendigo Jack was robbed and shot on the outskirts of town, George the Greek was speared by the local indigenous population, Frank the Austrian was murdered by an escaped convict he had befriended, Jimmy the Poet was stabbed in a brawl and Ah Moy went to sleep on the river bank and was never seen again. His pigtail was later recovered from the stomach of a crocodile.

Old Bill himself ended up dying of a gunshot wound after shootout in the main street with an creditor named Robert Jackson Craig.

During the 1879 deluge Old Bill’s pub, the Beehive, was lifted off its stumps and washed into Trinity Bay.

The local brothel owned by famous goldfield identity Kitty Palmer, built by the Chinese, fared no better and was also washed away by the flood.

The demise of Old Smithfield coincided with the opening up of the Bump Track between the Hodgkinson River goldfield and Port Douglas.

In 1879 the number of Port Douglas’ pubs rose to 21 as the town overtook Cairns as the major port in the region.

To checkout Old Smithfield head down Stewarts Road off the Cairns Western Arterial Road and look for the site of the old cemetery.

The actual site of the town is now covered by sugar cane.

BLOOMFIELD

In 2016 Bloomfield, 340km north of Cairns via the Mulligan Highway, had a population of 204 people.

However in its heyday at the discovery on alluvial tin in the early 1880s the region enjoyed a population explosion as miners raced to seek their fortune.

The Queenslander reported in 1986 more than 100 men mining tin used to cart the product 22km to the river, where it was shipped in small boats to Cooktown.

Danish pioneer Capt Asmundsen was one of the first settlers in 1879 to carve out a living growing coffee, cotton and tobacco.

Then in 1882 Frederick Bauer and two sons began the Bloomfield River Sugar Company and the first full scale crushing at the mill began in 1885.

A couple of years later an early Indigenous mission was founded on the banks of the Bloomfield River but abandoned in 1902, however today the Indigenous community of Wujal Wujal remans.

Today there is no actual township of township of Bloomfield.

Up the road at Ayton a hotel, store and police station have long faded away to be replaced with a modern IGA grocery store.