All Topics  
Bowen, Queensland

 
Bowen, Queensland

 
   Email Print
   Bookmark   Link
 

 

Bowen, Queensland
 
 
  Topics Bowen, Queensland Topic Home

Bowen is a town on the eastern coast of Queensland
Queensland

Queensland is a States and territories of Australia of Australia, occupying the north-eastern section of the mainland continent. It is bordered by the Northern Territory to the west, South Australia to the south-west and New South Wales to the south....
, Australia
Australia

Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the southern hemisphere comprising the Australia of the world's smallest continent, the major island of Tasmania, and numerous list of islands of Australia in the Indian Ocean and Pacific Oceans....
. At the 2006 census
Census in Australia

The Australian census is administered by the Australian Bureau of Statistics every five years. The most recent census was conducted on 8 August 2006....
, Bowen had a population of 7,484.

n is located on the north-east coast of Australia
Australia

Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the southern hemisphere comprising the Australia of the world's smallest continent, the major island of Tasmania, and numerous list of islands of Australia in the Indian Ocean and Pacific Oceans....
, at exactly twenty degrees south of the equator
Equator

The equator is the intersection of the Earth's surface with the Plane perpendicular to the Earth's rotation and containing the Earth's center of mass....
. In fact, the twentieth parallel
Circle of latitude

A circle of latitude, on the Earth, is an imaginary east-west circle connecting all locations that share a given latitude. A location's position along a circle of latitude is given by its longitude....
 crosses the main street. Bowen is halfway between Townsville
Townsville, Queensland

Townsville is a city on the north-eastern coast of Australia, in the state of Queensland. Adjacent to the central section of the Great Barrier Reef, it is in the dry tropics region of Queensland....
 and Mackay
Mackay, Queensland

Mackay is a city on the eastern coast of Queensland, Australia, about north of Brisbane, on the Pioneer River . Mackay is nicknamed the sugar capital of Australia because its region produces more than a third of Australia's cane sugar....
, and 1,130 kilometres by road from Brisbane
Brisbane

Brisbane is the state List of Australian capital cities of Queensland and its most populous city. It is also the List of cities in Australia by population in Australia, behind southern rivals Sydney and Melbourne....
.

Bowen sits on a square peninsula, with ocean to the north, east, and south.






Discussion
Ask a question about 'Bowen, Queensland'
Start a new discussion about 'Bowen, Queensland'
Answer questions from other users
Full Discussion Forum



Encyclopedia


Bowen is a town on the eastern coast of Queensland
Queensland

Queensland is a States and territories of Australia of Australia, occupying the north-eastern section of the mainland continent. It is bordered by the Northern Territory to the west, South Australia to the south-west and New South Wales to the south....
, Australia
Australia

Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the southern hemisphere comprising the Australia of the world's smallest continent, the major island of Tasmania, and numerous list of islands of Australia in the Indian Ocean and Pacific Oceans....
. At the 2006 census
Census in Australia

The Australian census is administered by the Australian Bureau of Statistics every five years. The most recent census was conducted on 8 August 2006....
, Bowen had a population of 7,484.

Geography

Bowen is located on the north-east coast of Australia
Australia

Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the southern hemisphere comprising the Australia of the world's smallest continent, the major island of Tasmania, and numerous list of islands of Australia in the Indian Ocean and Pacific Oceans....
, at exactly twenty degrees south of the equator
Equator

The equator is the intersection of the Earth's surface with the Plane perpendicular to the Earth's rotation and containing the Earth's center of mass....
. In fact, the twentieth parallel
Circle of latitude

A circle of latitude, on the Earth, is an imaginary east-west circle connecting all locations that share a given latitude. A location's position along a circle of latitude is given by its longitude....
 crosses the main street. Bowen is halfway between Townsville
Townsville, Queensland

Townsville is a city on the north-eastern coast of Australia, in the state of Queensland. Adjacent to the central section of the Great Barrier Reef, it is in the dry tropics region of Queensland....
 and Mackay
Mackay, Queensland

Mackay is a city on the eastern coast of Queensland, Australia, about north of Brisbane, on the Pioneer River . Mackay is nicknamed the sugar capital of Australia because its region produces more than a third of Australia's cane sugar....
, and 1,130 kilometres by road from Brisbane
Brisbane

Brisbane is the state List of Australian capital cities of Queensland and its most populous city. It is also the List of cities in Australia by population in Australia, behind southern rivals Sydney and Melbourne....
.

Bowen sits on a square peninsula, with ocean to the north, east, and south. On the western side, where the peninsula connects with the mainland, the Don River's alluvial plain provides fertile soil that supports a prosperous farming industry.

Climate

Bowen is in the dry tropics. This means it has all the warm sunny weather of a tropical climate, but it is much dryer than one would expect for tropical beaches overlooking the Great Barrier Reef
Great Barrier Reef

The Great Barrier Reef is the largest coral reef system in the world, composed of over 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands stretching for 2,600 kilometres over an area of approximately ....
.

At Bowen's latitude
Latitude

Latitude, usually denoted symbolically by the Greek letter phi gives the location of a place on Earth north or south of the equator. Lines of Latitude are the horizontal lines shown running east-to-west on maps ....
, the Trade Winds
Trade wind

The trade winds are the Prevailing winds of easterlies surface winds found in the tropics near the Earth's equator. The trade winds blow predominantly from the northeast in the Northern Hemisphere and from the southeast in the Southern Hemisphere....
 provide a pleasant breeze. The warmest month is January, with an average maximum temperature of 31 degrees Celsius
Celsius

Celsius is a temperature scale that is named after the Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius , who developed a similar temperature scale two years before his death....
 (88 degrees Fahrenheit
Fahrenheit

Fahrenheit is a temperature scale named after the physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit , who proposed it in 1724. Today, the scale has largely been replaced by the Celsius scale; it is still in use for non-scientific purposes in the United States and a few other countries such as Belize....
). The coolest month is July, with an average maximum temperature of 25 degrees Celsius
Celsius

Celsius is a temperature scale that is named after the Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius , who developed a similar temperature scale two years before his death....
 (77 degrees Fahrenheit
Fahrenheit

Fahrenheit is a temperature scale named after the physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit , who proposed it in 1724. Today, the scale has largely been replaced by the Celsius scale; it is still in use for non-scientific purposes in the United States and a few other countries such as Belize....
) and an average overnight minimum of 14 degrees Celsius
Celsius

Celsius is a temperature scale that is named after the Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius , who developed a similar temperature scale two years before his death....
 (57 degrees Fahrenheit
Fahrenheit

Fahrenheit is a temperature scale named after the physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit , who proposed it in 1724. Today, the scale has largely been replaced by the Celsius scale; it is still in use for non-scientific purposes in the United States and a few other countries such as Belize....
).

Economy

Bowen enjoys a diversified and prosperous economy based on agriculture, fishing, tourism, and mining. Bowen's unusually dry climate for a tropical location, plus its fertile alluvial
Alluvium

Alluvium is soil or sediments deposited by a river or other running water. Alluvium is typically made up of a variety of materials, including fine particles of silt and clay and larger particles of sand and gravel....
 soil, makes it the ideal place to grow a wide variety of small crops, including tomato
Tomato

The Tomato is an herbaceous, usually sprawling plant in the Solanaceae or nightshade family, as are its close cousins Nicotiana, potatoes, aubergine , chilli peppers, and the poisonous Atropa belladonna....
es, rockmelons (i.e., cantaloupe
Cantaloupe

Cantaloupe refers to two varieties of muskmelon , which is a species in the family Cucurbitaceae . Cantaloupes are typically 15?25 cm in length and are somewhat oblong, though not as oblong as watermelons....
s), and capsicum
Capsicum

Capsicum is a genus of plants from the nightshade family native to the Americas, where it was cultivated for thousands of years by the people of the tropical Americas, and is now cultivated worldwide....
s (i.e., green peppers). Outside the alluvial plain, much of the Bowen Shire is used for beef cattle.

Just north of Bowen is the Abbot Point coal
Coal

Coal is a readily combustion black or brownish-black sedimentary rock. The harder forms, such as anthracite, can be regarded as metamorphic rock because of later exposure to elevated temperature and pressure....
 loading port. Coal mined inland of Bowen in Collinsville and other towns in the Bowen Basin is brought by rail to a deepwater pier to be loaded on bulk carriers. Coal is exported mainly to Europe
Europe

Europe is, conventionally, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally divided from Asia to its east by the water divide of the Ural Mountains, the Ural , the Caspian Sea, and by the Caucasus Mountains to the southeast....
 and Japan
Japan

Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, People's Republic of China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south....
.

Government

In 1944 Bowen elected a Communist, Fred Paterson
Fred Paterson

Frederick Woolnough Paterson was an Australian politician. He was the only member of a Communism party ever to be elected to a parliament anywhere in Australia....
, to Queensland State Parliament. He was re-elected in 1947, but lost the seat in 1950 when the boundaries were changed to include Bowen in the seat of Whitsunday. In the recent Queensland council amalgamation elections, former Bowen Shire Mayor, Mike Brunker, was elected to lead the new Whitsunday Shire.

History

Captain James Cook
James Cook

Captain James Cook Royal Society Royal Navy was an English explorer, navigator and cartographer, ultimately rising to the rank of Captain in the Royal Navy....
 named Cape Gloucester on his voyage of exploration up the Australian coast in 1770. This "cape" turned out to be an island, and Gloucester Island dominates the view from Bowen's eastern beaches. Behind the island is a bay that forms an excellent port, which the town came to be built around. This bay was eventually discovered in 1859 by Captain Henry Daniel Sinclair, in response to a reward offered by the colony of New South Wales
New South Wales

New South Wales is Australia's oldest and most populous States and territories of Australia, located in the south-east of the country, north of Victoria and south of Queensland....
 for finding a port somewhere north of Rockhampton
Rockhampton, Queensland

Rockhampton is a regional city and Local Government Areas of Australia located in Queensland, Australia. Rockhampton is the largest urban centre in Central Queensland with the 2006 census recording the Rockhampton Statistical Subdivision population to be 74,530 people....
. Sinclair named Port Denison after the colonial governor of New South Wales.

Two years later, Sinclair led one group of settlers by sea, and George Elphinstone Dalrymple led another party overland from Rockhampton. They met on 11 April 1861 at Port Denison and founded the town of Bowen on the next day, 12 April 1861. By this time, the separate colony of Queensland
Queensland

Queensland is a States and territories of Australia of Australia, occupying the north-eastern section of the mainland continent. It is bordered by the Northern Territory to the west, South Australia to the south-west and New South Wales to the south....
 had been established, and the town was named after Queensland's first colonial governor, Sir George Ferguson Bowen
George Ferguson Bowen

Sir George Ferguson Bowen Order of Saint Michael and Saint George was a United Kingdom colony administrator whose appointments included postings to Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand....
.

Two years later in 1863, the new settlers discovered a sailor, James Morril, who had been shipwrecked 17 years previously just to the north of Bowen. Morril made his home in the new town, and his grave is still to be seen in the Bowen cemetery.

The coral reefs around Bowen have several shipwrecks, including the SS Gothenburg
SS Gothenburg

The SS Gothenburg was a steamship that operated along the United Kingdom and then later the Australian and New Zealand coastlines. In February 1875, she left Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia en route to Adelaide when she encountered a cyclone-strength storm off the north Queensland coast....
 which sank in 1875 with a loss of more than 100 lives. Numerous relics of Bowen's history, from the Aboriginal past onwards, are on display at the Bowen Historical Society's museum.

During World War 2
World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a Participants in World War II, including all of the great powers, organised into two opposing military alliances: the Allies of World War II and the Axis powers....
 Bowen hosted an air force base, flying PBY Catalina
PBY Catalina

The Consolidated PBY Catalina was an United States flying boat of the 1930s and 1940s produced by Consolidated Aircraft. It could be equipped with depth charges, bombs, torpedoes, and M2 Browning machine gun machine guns and was one of the most widely used multi-role aircraft of World War II....
 flying boats to search for enemy ships and submarines.

Tourism

Big Mango
Bowen is on a peninsula, with ocean on three sides. This gives eight beaches surrounding the town, namely Kings Beach, Queens Beach, Horseshoe Bay, Murrays Bay, Greys Bay, Rose Bay, and the Front Beach. There is also the clothing-optional Coral Bay. Kings Beach offers views of nearby Gloucester Island. On the western half of Queens Beach and all of Kings Beach, it is permitted to walk a dog without a leash.

'Australia' film

In late 2006, it was announced that Australia, directed by Baz Luhrmann
Baz Luhrmann

Mark Anthony "Baz" Luhrmann is an Academy Award- and Golden Globe-nominated Australian film director, screenwriter, and film producer best known for The Red Curtain Trilogy....
 and starring Nicole Kidman
Nicole Kidman

Nicole Mary Kidman, Order of Australia is an Academy Award-winning Hawaiian-born Australian actress, fashion model, singer, United Nations Citizen of the World award-winning humanitarian, and a UNIFEM and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador....
 and Hugh Jackman
Hugh Jackman

Hugh Michael Jackman is an Australian actor who is involved in film, musical theatre, and television.A singer, dancer and actor in stage musicals, principally The Boy From Oz, Jackman has won international recognition for his roles in major films, his forte being action/superhero, period and romance characters....
, will be filmed in Bowen. It is hoped that the production will provide a significant economic boost to the town and will employ many Bowen locals.

Entertainment

Bowen boasts a cinema, the Summergarden Twin Theatre, The Denison Hotel, The Queens Beach Hotel, The Bowen Memorial Club, and The Grand View Hotel. It also offers four motels and seven caravan parks. There is also a golf course that overlooks Queens Beach.

Education

Bowen hosts the Barrier Reef Institute of TAFE. Denison Hotel

Sister cities

Bowen has a sister city in Japan
Japan

Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, People's Republic of China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south....
, Oseto-cho
Oseto, Nagasaki

was a towns of Japan located in Nishisonogi District, Nagasaki, Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan.As of 2003, the town had an estimated population of 7,577 and a population density of 96.25 persons per km?....
 in Nagasaki Prefecture
Nagasaki Prefecture

is a Prefectures of Japan of Japan located on the island of Kyushu. The capital is the city of Nagasaki, Nagasaki....
.

External links