Ball was working as a manager, not exploring for its own sake. In 1864 he ran Woodstock Station, south of the Ross River, for the pastoralists Robert Towns and John Melton Black, who between them held a sprawl of cattle and sheep runs across the district. They needed a port at Cleveland Bay to ship station produce out, and Black asked Ball to go find one. In April 1864 he set out north with Mark Watt Reid and two Aboriginal stockmen - men whose knowledge of the country went unrecorded but who shared the journey, and without whose skill in unfamiliar bush such expeditions rarely succeeded - and eventually reached the mouth of what would be named the Ross River. The site he picked for a wharf lay on Ross Creek, an arm of the river's delta, sheltered enough to land cargo yet close to the open waters of Cleveland Bay.

It was the great granite outcrop that fixed the place in Ball's mind. Rising abruptly over the flat coast, Castle Hill reminded him of home - of Castletown, the old capital of the Isle of Man - and so he called his new settlement Castletown. The name did not last. When a government surveyor laid out an official town site in 1865, it was renamed Townsville in honour of Robert Towns, the merchant who had financed the venture and who, by some accounts, barely visited the place that would bear his name. There is a quiet irony in that. The man who scouted the harbour, picked the ground and gave it its first name watched it renamed for his absent backer. Ball had chosen the spot; Towns got the city; and the granite hill that started it all still looms over the streets below.

Ball's later life settled into the rhythms of a booming colonial town. After a few more years of pastoral work he returned to Townsville, went into business, and in 1877 married Rose O'Neill, the widow who already ran the Exchange Hotel on Flinders Street. Rose was the real force behind the hotel - she had built its reputation and nearly doubled its size in the 1870s - and together she and the charming, well-connected Ball, with interests on the Ravenswood and Charters Towers goldfields, made the Exchange one of the most popular houses in town. When fire destroyed the timber building in 1881, booming Townsville simply rebuilt it grander in brick. Ball gave up the licence the next year, retiring from hotel work while keeping a hand in the town's affairs.

When Andrew Ball died in 1894, Townsville flew its flags at half-mast for a man it regarded as one of its own. Rose outlived him by three decades, remaining at their home, Rosebank, until her death in 1925 at the age of 83. Their only daughter married into one of Queensland's notable legal families. Today a monument marking the centenary of Townsville's settlement stands in Anzac Memorial Park, between the Centenary Fountain and the bandstand, a quiet acknowledgement of the man who looked at a granite hill and saw a city - on country that had long belonged to others.