Before it was a township, JC Waterhole became something darker. By the 1870s it served as the regional headquarters of the Native Police, the colonial paramilitary force that operated across the Queensland frontier under Sub-Inspector William Gough. The Native Police were instruments of violent dispossession, deployed against Aboriginal people as European pastoralists pushed into country that had been lived in and cared for across countless generations. That this remote waterhole was chosen as a base says much about the era. The pretty name and the crumbling pub ruins that draw travellers today sit atop a more painful history, one in which the same water that drew settlers had long sustained the Aboriginal peoples of the Channel Country, whose claim to this land far predated any carved initials.

In the early 1880s the JC Hotel rose beside the old waterhole, and in 1884 the settlement was formally renamed Canterbury, an incongruously English name for a speck of mud-walled buildings in the heart of the outback. A post office followed, opening on the first day of 1891 after operating as a receiving office from 1888. For a few decades Canterbury was a real place on the map, a staging point in a region where the next neighbour and the next river both went by the name Morney. In a country measured in hundreds of kilometres between settlements, even a single hotel was a landmark.

It is hard, from the comfort of a sealed highway, to grasp what a building like the JC Hotel meant. The Channel Country is one of the emptiest inhabited regions on Earth, a place where droving cattle or hauling wool meant days in the saddle or behind a team, far from anywhere. A pub at a permanent waterhole was a fixed point in that immensity: somewhere to water horses, draw a drink, swap news from up and down the track, and break the enormous distances of the Diamantina country. Settlements like Canterbury were the punctuation marks of the outback, the places where the long sentences of the stock routes paused. That a township could grow from one man's initials on a tree, flourish for a generation, and then vanish almost completely says everything about how thin the margin of European settlement always was out here.

The decline was slow and then complete. The post office closed in 1920. The hotel held on far longer, finally ceasing operations in 1956. After that, the building's fate followed a peculiarly outback logic: once the roof was removed, the unprotected earthen walls began to dissolve in the rare but violent rains, melting back into the ground they were raised from. What survives now are low mounds and fragments, the JC Hotel Ruins, alongside a small cemetery whose headstones record the names of people who lived and died at this isolated outpost. It is one of the most evocative ghost sites on the long road between Windorah and Birdsville, a township that lasted barely seventy years and left only its bones.