Indigenous The area was originally inhabited by the
Indjilandji Indigenous Australians.
British exploration In 1861, an expedition led by
William Landsborough became the first British incursion into the area. Landsborough named the
Barkly Tablelands after the Governor of Victoria, Sir
Henry Barkly. He also named a waterhole Lake Francis after his niece Frances Landsborough, around which the future town of Camooweal was built. Landsborough found the Aboriginal people abundant in the vicinity, writing that: "This place seems a favourite resort for blacks...there were about one hundred blacks in the neighbourhood of the camp some of whom were so bold that I feared it might be necessary to shoot some of them."
Establishment of Rocklands Station In 1865, colonist George Sutherland arrived at Mary Lake with 8,000 sheep to establish
Rocklands sheep station. He described their arrival as: "On the left bank of the river at the lake [was] a large camp of blacks, on rushed the sheep through fires, blacks, and all other impediments to quench their thirst. The unfortunate niggers had a terrible time of it. To be roused up out of their sleep at midnight by some 8,000 sheep rushing madly and tumbling over them was chaos, was something demonical to the simple natives, who never saw, or heard of jumbucks before." The Aboriginal inhabitants resisted Sutherland's aim to dispossess them. "After the fright the blacks got on the night of our arrival to rob them of their country, we thought the poor wretches would give us a very wide berth, [however] a shower of spears, nulla-nullas, and other waddies came flying in all directions. Unfortunately only one of the whole party had any firearms, all left in the tents. The one possessing a revolver fired twice at the niggers, haphazard in the dark. Of course all made a rush to the tents, to secure, firearms, but in the dark these were not easily found, and had the savages followed us up, they could easily have massacred the lot of us. However they didn’t, but grabbed and took everything they could lay hands on." The word for water from many now extinct Indigenous languages across central and western Queensland was
camoo. A police station opened in 1886. Camooweal Provisional School opened on 5 June 1893. On 1 January 1909 it became Camooweal State School. The town
bore was drilled in 1897. On 2 January 1931, a Qantas Air Ambulance from the
Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia flown by E.G. Donaldson rescued a man in Camooweal and delivered him to Brisbane. The road through Camooweal to the
Northern Territory (now the Barkly Highway) was the inland defence route for
World War II. This road was built by army engineers and carried over 1000 vehicles a day and there are numerous historical sites marked along the road. The town had electricity from 1952. St Therese's Catholic Church was officially opened on 30 April 1961 by
Hugh Edward Ryan,
Bishop of Townsville. The Camooweal Caves National Park was gazetted on 16 December 1994. In 2005 the Mount Isa City Council erected a war memorial outside the community hall (former shire hall of the
Shire of Barkly Tableland). == Demographics ==