Townsville
Located 1150 kilometres north-northwest of Brisbane on the shores of Cleveland Bay in Wulgurukaba and Bindal country. Townsville is the largest settlement in the North and its unofficial capital. As such, the city hosts many administrative offices whose jurisdictions cover Queensland's northern half.
The red rock monolith the Wulgurukaba people called Cutheringa (Castle Hill) overlooks a flat landscape that accommodated significant growth over the last part of the 20th century.
The city's population grew from 51,143 in 1961 to 68,591 (1971), 80,365 in 1976, and 164,008 thirty years later. While those figures were inflated by the 2008 amalgamation of Townsville and Thuringowa City, the city's urban sprawl only began to spread into Thuringowa in the mid-1970s.
