This is, and long was, Indjalandji-Dhidhanu country. Native title over nearly twenty thousand square kilometres of the upper Georgina River basin - red and black soil reaching across the Queensland and Northern Territory border - was recognised as belonging to the Indjalandji-Dhidhanu people, who have lived here for tens of thousands of years. Long before drovers gathered under any tree, the Georgina and its waterholes were favoured camping places, and the river itself formed part of a major Aboriginal trade route running north and south through the heart of the continent. The droving track that brought Europeans here followed a logic the land already held. The Tree of Knowledge stands on country that was a meeting place and a route of exchange long before its English name.

European pastoralists arrived in the wake of William Landsborough, who crossed this area in 1861–62 while searching for the lost explorers Burke and Wills. The first lease, Rocklands, was taken up in 1865, abandoned, then resettled in the 1870s. By 1883 local squatters had petitioned for a town at the junction of the Georgina stock route and the track to the Territory, and Camooweal was born. A wide pasturage reserve beside the town gave passing drovers a place to rest. For men on the trade route from Burketown, camping here meant water and feed for the animals, clean clothes, and a chance to use the town's shops, mail, and medical help - even, for families who came this way often, to put their children into the local school for a spell.

Of all the spots on the reserve, one coolibah drew the crowd. Oral history from the drovers who used the route remembers it clearly: this tree sat far enough from the river to escape flash flooding and was sheltered from the prevailing southerly winds - a reliably comfortable place to sit. So they sat. They brewed tea, they yarned, they passed on what they had seen down the track: where the feed was good, where a waterhole had dried, which stretch of road had turned bad. In a country where a traveller might go days without meeting anyone, this exchange of gossip and practical knowledge was genuinely valuable. The name 'Tree of Knowledge' was no joke. Under this canopy, the isolated business of droving became, briefly, a community.

Trucks eventually replaced the great droving plants, and the long overland walks faded into memory. But the tree remained, and in 2005 it was added to the Queensland Heritage Register - an unusual listing, honouring not a building but a living thing and the human stories it sheltered. It is worth distinguishing from the more famous Tree of Knowledge at Barcaldine, the birthplace of the Australian Labor Party; Camooweal's tree commemorates something humbler and more intimate, the working life of the stock routes. The scarring around its trunk, reaching some 2.5 metres up, is part of its weathered character. For the descendants of drovers and pastoralists, this coolibah is a physical focal point for memory - a single tree still standing for everyone who once gathered beneath it.