History
Before Europeans settled in the area around the 1870s, numerous Aboriginal clans occupied the fertile coastal strip. Aboriginal cultural heritage sites are located at Hann and Kalpowar crossings.
The first explorer to visit the area by land was Edmund Kennedy. Another early explorer of the region was William Hann. Laura Homestead was established in 1892 or earlier and is one of the oldest, intact, pastoral homesteads in the region. Lakefield was gazetted in 1979, after the Queensland Government purchased several cattle stations the previous year. In 2005, a Townsville man was attacked and killed by a crocodile while he was canoeing with his wife at the Midway waterhole on the Normanby River.
Read more about this topic: Lakefield National Park
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“The history of reform is always identical; it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)