"We shifted to Strathmere in 1933. It was a prickly pear development block. Dad paid £600 for 22,000 acres.

It would take six weeks to muster the sheep before shearing because the pear was full of water and they wouldn't come in. The thorns were terrible . . . the shearers had to wear basil (sheep hide tanned with bark) from head to toe to protect themselves.

Dad owned a Ford V8 and a Chrysler in the 30s, but when he got a new car in the 40s he had to have a permit to buy it."
— Arthur "Buck" Underwood, St George farmer

ALMOST a century before Buck Underwood's father bought his wartime Studebaker Champion, the inveterate explorer Sir Thomas Mitchell was crossing what is now the state border with NSW near Hebel and tracking the Balonne River north to a natural ford he named St George's Bridge.

Mitchell was looking for a great, northward-flowing river and a route to Port Essington from Sydney. What he found as he explored the headwaters of the Maranoa and the country drained by the Warrego, Barcoo and Belyando rivers were wide natural plains covered with a tough grass that now bears his name.

It would be more than 100 years before the descendants of the pioneers who carved a pastoral life out of this fine grazing land would seriously turn to something else for a living — cotton.

From 1904 St George had artesian bores which provided a secure water supply for stock, but life was always subject to the same cycles of droughts, floods, bushfires, plunging wool prices, economic collapses and natural and man-made calamities which battered Muttaburra graziers to the north.

St George, too, had a union strikers' camp in 1890; it also saw much of its built heritage disappear in smoke and its people suffer isolation and privations unknown to those on the coast. And, like Muttaburra, St George missed out on a railway line.

But in 1950, after the Balonne flooded disastrously and sent district graziers climbing on to their roofs, the town got what it needed — a more manageable, reliable water resource — and it was saved.

St George, like Muttaburra, grew up on the sheep's back and, to some extent, on cattle. It had easily outgrown the other town by the 1890s.

Its milestones were a chronology for the inland: a post office, its first hotel and record floods in 1864, a courthouse and lock-up in 1870, school and bank in 1874, telegraph office in 1876, newspaper in 1878, hospital in 1879.

Ten years later its population was about 700 and growing, but by 1900 it was a town ravaged by drought and pests (notably rabbits), white-anted by fires and facing crippling economic reality. Its population was listed at 581.

During the outback rebuilding after the Great Drought, St George saw its first cars in 1911 and its first motor garage in 1915 (when a substantial part of the town burned down) and it got an ambulance brigade in 1925.

In February 1921, the first planes landed — two war surplus biplanes being delivered from Sydney to Longreach for a new airline. The pilots were Qantas founders Hudson Fysh and Paul McGinness, whose weekly air service to Brisbane would start in 1930.

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"The best country grew the best pear, and that was the country that was abandoned first. Land was cheap after that . . . a lot of it was a wilderness. The dead pear would hang like skeletons from the trees."

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The government's "populate the bush" agenda received a boost between the wars, but the hardship of life was ever-present.

Buck Underwood lost a five-year-old brother to peritonitis because the road into St George had been made impassable by rain and he could not be given emergency treatment. "A lot of children died in those days," Buck recalls.

On the land, drought and pests took a terrible toll. "The prickly pear was like a mantle over the land in the 1920s," recalls long-time St George resident Ken Murchison.

"The best country grew the best pear, and that was the country that was abandoned first. Land was cheap after that . . . a lot of it was a wilderness. The dead pear would hang like skeletons from the trees."

The human cost of two world wars was terrible. A hospital was built in St George as a memorial to those who would never return.

Post-war rebuilding meant immigration. Europeans flooded into Queensland, but many never found their El Dorados. From 1948, they helped build the Jack Taylor Weir, designed to supplement the town water supply and irrigate smaller blocks.

The plan was to raise fat lambs, but when cotton was first planted in the 1950s there was no doubt where the town's future lay.