Blackwater

Blackwater is both a town and a region in the Central Highlands Region, Queensland, Australia, 190 km west of Rockhampton. It is a town in a huge coal mining territory in Central Queensland. The name of the township was motivated by the dull shade of neighborhood waterholes. Blackwater was set up on Kanolu domain, and is named after the Blackwater Creek which clearly was first seen to stream with dark water, accepted to be caused by the nearby coal deposits. Coal stores were found there by Ludwig Leichhardt on his undertaking from Moreton Bay to Port Essington now Darwin, Northern Territory in 1845. Leichhardt saw "beds of coal undefined from those on the Hunter at Newcastle".

It wasn't until over a century after Leichhardt initially found the beds of coal at Blackwater that the town saw significant coal mining improvement. With the opening up of a few coal mines close to the town during the 1960s, Blackwater's populace quickly expanded as individuals looking for work rushed to discover work in the town's blasting mining industry. There were 77 individuals living in Blackwater when the 1961 enumeration was recorded. This expanded to just about 2,000 when the 1971 statistics was recorded.