Long before the geologists arrived with their theories, and long before the gold, this was - and remains - the country of the Ewamian people, the traditional owners of the land around Georgetown. Their connection to this part of the Gulf Savannah runs deep into the same deep time the rocks record, in a relationship to country that predates every map, lease and town survey laid over it. Georgetown today is small enough to walk across in minutes, but it sits within a far older human geography, one whose presence the modern town's brief gold-rush story should not be allowed to eclipse.

The European town was born of a gold rush on the Etheridge River in the 1870s, established right on the site of the diggings. At first it was simply called Etheridge, after the river and the field. In 1871 the name changed to Georgetown, in honour of Howard St George, an early gold commissioner - and so a frontier mining camp came to carry the dignified name of the official who policed it. The post office opened in January 1872, the state school in 1874, and the town settled into the rhythm of a goldfield service centre. As at Croydon and across north Queensland's fields, Chinese miners prospected here too, and the town once held one or possibly two joss houses. By 1900 the gold was fading and grazing had taken over as the region's economic mainstay - the pattern that has sustained Georgetown ever since.

For a town this size to hold a world-class mineral collection is improbable, and Georgetown holds one anyway. The Terrestrial Information Centre houses the Ted Elliot Mineral Collection - more than 4,500 mineral specimens, gathered from across the local district and around the world. It is the kind of collection you would expect in a capital-city museum, set down instead beside a tourist information desk in the outback, a quiet monument to one collector's obsession and to the mineral-rich geology that made this whole region matter. The centre's very name nods to the strange ground it stands on: terrestrial, of the earth, in a place where the earth itself has an unusually long and well-travelled story to tell.

About 20 kilometres west of Georgetown, a single square brick chimney stands alone on the plain - all that remains of the town of Cumberland, once among the largest and most productive gold mines on the Etheridge field. Gold was found here in 1872, and at its peak in the 1880s Cumberland held around 400 people and a highly mechanised operation, with steam engines driving the ore-crushing batteries. The chimney itself was raised in 1899, built by Cornish masons who carried the stoneworking traditions of Cornwall's own mines to the far side of the world. Everything else is gone. The chimney and its dam now make a lonely, photogenic camp, the lagoon below it loud with birds - though, as at so many old workings, some of the ground stays contaminated, and the warning signs mean what they say.