Rising Sun Intersection
The four-way junction of Charters Towers Road, Queens Road, Bowen Road and Ross River Road was, until relatively recent times, one of Townsville's most significant intersections. While Queens Road entered the equation a little later, the point where the roads to Charters Towers and Bowen parted company was an obvious location for a wayside watering hole, and the Rising Sun Hotel opened around 1874.
At that point, the road to Ravenswood and Charters Towers ran through John Melton Black and Robert Towns' abandoned coconut, coffee and sugar plantation and boiling-down works (subsequently Hermit Park). The hotel, located close to the plantation's western boundary, became the centre of a cluster of buildings that included a blacksmith and a general store.
Although the railway to Charters Towers took away much of the former road traffic to the Towers when it opened in 1882, the route still carried significant traffic—enough to justify a new hotel (The Aitkenvale Arms) slightly further out catering to travellers on the Georgetown Road and a small local population.
At the same time, traffic continued moving along the old Woodstock road that forked from the Charters Towers road in front of the hotel and subsequently became known as Bowen Road. It became the main road to the railway camps and for most of the road traffic to Charter Towers and was also the only road out of Townsville to Ayr and Bowen.
Workers from the new waterworks settled in the vicinity after the Townsville Municipal Council began supplying reticulated water from wells beside the present Mundingburra State School. Although the local population remained relatively sparse, the area's industrial and recreational development — the Hermit Park race course was a little closer to town, and Johnson & Castling butchers operated a slaughterhouse near the present Townsville Golf Clubhouse — and passing traffic provided the stimulus that delivered a second hotel (the Royal Oak) on the opposite side of the road a little closer to town in 1884, with the new Mundingburra School a little further out.
By that time, there was a daily omnibus service between the A.S.N. Company's wharf and the Rising Sun Hotel in May 1882, and wealthy businessmen were availing themselves of "the beautiful villa sites for residence in the suburbs, which are daily becoming more in demand." (Queenslander, 6 May 1882)
By 1884, the road out of downtown Townsville had a settled pocket around the Hermiot Park Hotel, with the rest of the roadside real estate divided between farms and villas on acreage belonging to the town's business elite.
Twenty years later, St Matthews Church had joined the Rising Sun Hotel on the fourway's southeast corner. Neither building survived Cyclone Leonta unscathed, but the church was rebuilt while the hotel was demolished. A two-storey building with wide verandahs replaced the original single-storey structure and (according to local legend) may have been removed from another site, possibly one of the gold fields. Regardless of its origin, the replacement survived until it was burned down in 1968.
