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Gympie

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Picture Gallery: Gympie and the Mary Valley

Gympie Station
Gympie Station
The Valley Rattler at Gympie Station
The Valley Rattler at Gympie Station
Mary Valley
Mary Valley
Mary Valley
Mary Valley
Mary Valley
Mary Valley
Mary Valley
Mary Valley
Gympie Station
Gympie Station

Google Street View: Scenes around Gympie

VBRailwayHotel
Railway Hotel, Gympie
MaryStreet
Mary Street, Gympie

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Gympie

Gympie has the honour of being named after a venomous plant, the giant Gympie stinger known to the indigenous people as 'gimpi gimpi'. For a collection of startling anecdotes regarding the effects on victims, see the Australian Geographic.

Gympie grew from obscure beginnings to a boom town after gold was discovered in 1867. Nowadays Gympie is a more typical country town with a focus on agriculture: the region around Gympie is a maze of back roads leading to farms large and small. The subtropical climate encourages a variety of produce, from beans to bananas, from pigs to pineapples.

Flooding is a topic that recurs constantly in Gympie, for it lives with the nagging threat of the Mary River, much like the ever-present threat of earthquake to a town built on a fault line. Somewhat uniquely, the town floods from underground when the river backs up through drainage systems and old mineshafts - in the legendary 1893 floods some of these mineshafts exploded in debris-laden geysers as their flood barriers failed and the water pressure hurled timbers and machinery into the air.

The town is studded with heritage-listed buildings dating from the wealthy gold-rush era and has an active Gold Mining Museum.

The gallery on this page features a heritage railway that runs intermittently (depending on the state of tracks, bridges and rolling stock) along a defunct branch line from Gympie into the Mary Valley. See the Mary Valley Rattler website for more information.

Book references:
A Flight of Dolphins, Part 3: Insight
The Forgiving Spirit, Part 2: Rosalind Honeysett

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