The story begins with land taken from a famous name. Greenmount Station, on the southern bank of the Pioneer River, was first claimed in 1861 by John Mackay - the explorer whose name the city still bears, and who is said to have planted a fig tree here in 1862 that still shades the grounds. Mackay soon forfeited the lease, and the property changed hands for half a century before Vida Althea Cook acquired it in 1914. The Cooks were already district aristocracy: Albert Cook was the son of pioneer John Cook of nearby Balnagowan Station. Though they had a perfectly good homestead at Balnagowan, the couple chose to make their home at Greenmount, on a rare hilltop overlooking the family's Pleystowe sugar mill and the green sea of cane below.

In 1915 the Mackay architect William Sykes drew up the plans, reworking Albert Cook's own rough sketches and modelling the new house on the second Balnagowan homestead. Local Walkerston builders Arthur Carter & Co. raised it between July and December that year - a single-storey Queenslander with a corrugated-iron gambrel roof, projecting gables, and broad verandahs wrapping every side against the tropical heat. Even the materials carried family history: the fireplace and mantelpiece were lifted out of the old Balnagowan and re-installed at Greenmount. Around the main house grew a small village of purpose - cattle dip, gas house, blacksmith's workshop, dray sheds - much of it built from timber and iron recycled from dismantled Balnagowan buildings, including a schoolroom for the children. The house has barely changed since the 1920s.

Greenmount was a working enterprise, and the Cooks made it a quietly important one. Here they established one of Queensland's first Aberdeen-Angus studs - a daring bet at the time. The black Scottish breed had arrived in Australia but numbered barely a thousand head in all of Queensland by the 1880s, even though the colony was then the country's largest beef producer. Albert Cook stood among the vanguard of breeders reassessing the Angus, and the stud he built helped shape the region's cattle. After his death in 1948, his son Thomas carried it forward, and in the 1950s introduced Brahmans and Brahman crosses - the humped, heat-tolerant cattle that would come to define tropical Australian beef country. For more than 120 years the family's name was bound up with the growth of both the sugar and the cattle industries around Mackay.

When Thomas Cook died in 1981, his widow Dorothy did something unusual: she gave Greenmount away. The homestead, its 11 hectares, and the accumulated belongings of three generations passed to the local council, which leases it to the Mackay Historical Society as a museum. The grounds are kept as the Tom and Dorothy Cook Memorial Park, and the collection has since grown to more than twenty thousand artefacts - so that the place demonstrates, in the words of the Queensland Heritage Register, 'a way of life no longer common.' That intactness is exactly what makes it rare; few early-20th-century Queensland homesteads survive complete with their outbuildings, formal garden, original fittings and family furniture all together. An avenue of old mango trees still lines the original drive, large figs shade the slope, and inside, beneath those ornate pressed-metal ceilings, the Cook family's world waits, almost untouched, for the next visitor to walk in.