Long before the copper and the cattle, this was Mitakoodi country - Pimurra, in their own language, a land of rivers running through semi-arid plains. The Mitakoodi were known as the River people, and they shared these lands with neighbours including the Mayi, the Maithakari, and the Wanamara. In August 2024, after a legal struggle that began in the 1990s, the Federal Court formally recognised the native title of the Mitakoodi and Mayi people over the headwaters and tributaries of the Cloncurry River - an acknowledgement, made on Country, that their law and custom had survived everything the past century threw at them. Today nearly a quarter of Cloncurry's residents identify as Aboriginal, and the river that gives the town its name has carried its first people's story far longer than its second's.

The first Europeans through here were the explorers Burke and Wills, crossing this country on the 1860 expedition that would kill them both. Burke named the Cloncurry River after his cousin, Lady Elizabeth Cloncurry, and the town later borrowed the name from the river. What built the place, though, was metal. In 1867 the explorer Ernest Henry - remembered locally as 'the father of Cloncurry' - found copper in the hills, and a township sprang up to service the mines. Gold came and went in short-lived rushes; copper boomed hardest in the early twentieth century. Through it all ran the cattle, droved across vast pastoral runs watered, after the 1890s, by bores tapping the Great Artesian Basin far below. Copper and cattle remain the twin engines of The Curry to this day, and the town's saleyards are among the busiest in the north.

Reverend John Flynn spent years dreaming of a 'mantle of safety' for the outback - a way to bring a doctor to people scattered across distances that swallowed ambulances whole. The pieces came together at Cloncurry. With a young Qantas leasing him an aircraft for two shillings a mile, Flynn launched the Aerial Medical Service here in May 1928. On that first flight, pilot Arthur Affleck flew with no radio and no navigation aids but a compass, carrying Dr Kenyon St Vincent Welch to Julia Creek. The service grew into the Royal Flying Doctor Service, now recognised the world over, and Cloncurry honours its birthplace with the Flying Doctor Museum. The same impulse echoes still: the local Uniting Church runs the McKay Patrol, a small aircraft ministering to people across more than half a million square kilometres of outback.

For most of the twentieth century, Cloncurry held a fearsome distinction: the hottest temperature ever recorded in Australia, an apocalyptic 127.5 degrees Fahrenheit - about 53 Celsius - logged on 16 January 1889. The record made the town famous and helped earn it a reputation as one of the most punishing places to live on the continent. Then, in 1997, investigators looked again and found a problem. That 1889 reading had been taken inside an improvised screen knocked together from a beer crate, not a standard instrument shelter, and under proper conditions the true temperature was probably closer to 47 degrees. The Bureau of Meteorology struck the record from the books. Cloncurry is still ferociously hot - high forties in the wet-season build-up - but its most celebrated claim turned out to be a measurement error that stood for more than a hundred years.

For a town of barely three thousand, Cloncurry punches far above its weight. It calls itself the Friendly Heart of the Great North West, and twice - in 2013 and 2018 - it was voted Queensland's friendliest town. It produced the novelist Alexis Wright, one of Australia's most acclaimed Aboriginal writers, and the firebrand outback politician Bob Katter, born here in 1945. In 2021, when the pandemic locked the world's cameras out of exotic locations, the reality series Australian Survivor decamped to Cloncurry instead, filming its season in the red dirt and merciless sun. The town that gave the outback its flying doctors keeps finding new ways to be useful - and, against considerable odds, to be liked.