Before Australia became a single nation, even its cattle paid duty at the border. That is why a town called Oontoo briefly existed here, on a flat stretch of Channel Country immediately east of the South Australian line, near where Strzelecki Creek slips across from one colony into the next. There is nothing left of it now. As of 2025 the land holds no buildings at all, only native pasture and grazing stock. But for a few decades around the turn of the twentieth century, this remote spot had a customs house, a store, a doctor, a school, and an officer whose job was to stand at the edge of the continent and collect taxes from passing drovers.
Oontoo was a creature of the colonial border. Before federation in 1901, Queensland and South Australia were separate jurisdictions with separate tariffs, and stock moving between them could be taxed. In April 1886 the Queensland Government surveyed and offered roughly seventy town lots for sale, and a customs post was established the same year on a square mile of land carved out of the vast Nappa Merrie cattle station. Its purpose was blunt: to levy duty on the drovers who pushed their mobs across the border along Strzelecki Creek, the same broad watercourse that gave the famous track its name. A man named Ivory was the first customs officer, arriving in 1886 and living in a tent until his house was finished the following year.
For a moment, Oontoo tried to become a real place. The little settlement gathered a store, a school and a doctor, the small machinery of permanence. In 1887 it doubled as a depot for materials used to build the rabbit-proof fence, that doomed colonial attempt to hold back an introduced plague with wire and posts. There were even race meetings here, the Oontoo Races, the kind of social occasion that stitched scattered outback communities together across enormous distances. For the stockmen, station hands and customs officials of the Cooper Creek frontier, this dot on the map was a genuine, if tiny, hub of life in country where the nearest neighbour might be a hard day's ride away.
Oontoo's grid of seventy lots was drawn on land that was never empty. This is the Channel Country of the Yandruwandha and their neighbours, a people who had lived along Cooper Creek and Strzelecki Creek for thousands of years before any colonial surveyor arrived with a theodolite and a tariff schedule. It was on these same watercourses, a short ride from where Oontoo would stand, that the Yandruwandha had kept John King alive after Burke and Wills died in 1861. The customs town was a late and minor expression of the same wave of pastoral settlement that pushed those traditional owners off their waterholes. The straight border the officers policed was a European abstraction laid across Country that had its own far older boundaries, songs and names, and the cattle paying duty at Oontoo were grazing land that had changed hands without anyone asking.
The thing that made Oontoo necessary also doomed it. When the Australian colonies federated in 1901, internal customs borders dissolved overnight, and a town built to tax cattle crossing a line that no longer mattered had nothing left to do. The population had already been thinning; by 1897 only fourteen people remained, and the customs station closed in 1902. The store, the school and the doctor followed the reason for their existence into the dust. Today Oontoo is counted among Queensland's ghost towns, though ghost may flatter it; the buildings are entirely gone, and only the survey records and a handful of old photographs prove the place was ever more than open ground. It is a small, sharp lesson in how completely a settlement can vanish when the single reason for its being disappears.
Oontoo lay just inside Queensland on the South Australian border at 27.65 degrees S, 141.02 degrees E, in the Channel Country near the crossing of Strzelecki Creek and a short distance from the Nappa Merrie station and the Burke and Wills Dig Tree. From the air there is nothing built to see; navigate instead by the green thread of Strzelecki Creek and the nearby channels of Cooper Creek winding through pale, flat grazing plains, with the dead-straight Queensland-South Australia border as the defining feature. Nearest airfields are Innamincka (YINN) to the west and the Moomba airstrip (YOOM) to the southwest, with Thargomindah (YTGM) far to the northeast. Recommended viewing altitude 2,000 to 4,000 feet AGL; the terrain is featureless gibber and floodplain, so the watercourses are the only reliable landmarks and heat haze often limits midday visibility.