In 1863, a Scottish settler named James McLaren took up a run north of Clermont and called it Blair Athol after his homeland. Like many in Central Queensland at the time, McLaren’s focus was cattle and water. In 1864, while digging a well on his homestead block, he hit something unexpected. Instead of water, he struck a black seam of coal. Local accounts note it as the first recorded coal find in the district, though at the time McLaren had little use for it. He was running stock, not a mine.
For the next few years, the coal stayed where it was. Transport was poor and markets were far away. But word spread. By the early 1870s, shallow shafts were dug on Blair Athol, confirming that McLaren’s chance strike was no fluke. Beneath the paddocks lay thick seams of clean coal. Smelters in the region began to take notice, and slowly the district shifted from cattle country to something else entirely.
Capella made its own quiet entry into the story. In February 1894, the Morning Bulletin carried a short line: “Coal has been discovered a short distance from Capella by a selector named Thompson”.
It was just a passing mention, but it gave Capella its place in the coal story. Here was proof that seams were not confined to Blair Athol, they cropped out across the district, waiting for someone to notice.
The true scale of Blair Athol only became clear decades later.
Its Big Seam was measured at more than 25 metres thick, one of the richest seams ever recorded in Australia. In 1922, the Governor of Queensland officially opened Blair Athol as the state’s first open cut black coal mine, a turning point in Queensland mining.
But coal is unpredictable. One of Blair Athol’s most dramatic chapters came not from expansion, but from fire. Deep underground, a seam ignited and smouldered for 54 years. Old workings and oxygen seepage kept it alive.
In 2004, open cut mining even cut into the burning seam, and engineers had to battle flame and production side by side. They used a jet engine inertisation unit, pumping oxygen poor gases into the seam until the fire finally gave way.
The tale of a coal fire that burned for half a century became part of Blair Athol’s folklore, a reminder that coal is a living, combustible force.
The mine also reshaped communities. By the 1970s, surveys showed the township of Blair Athol itself sat over the richest coal. Families were moved, schools and houses dismantled, and the township was shifted to nearby Clermont. By the 1980s, only the cemetery marked where a community once stood.
Coal changed Central Queensland in other ways too. By the late 1960s, new discoveries further north led to the birth of Moranbah, a town built from scratch by Utah Development to house mine workers and their families. Where Capella and Clermont had grown from pastoral roots, Moranbah was built for coal.
Today, the Bowen Basin is one of the most important coal regions in the world, its output shipped across the globe.
But its story began simply, with a Scottish pastoralist digging for water and a Capella farmer turning up black rock in his paddock. Those moments of chance became the foundations of an industry that reshaped landscapes, created towns, and continues to fuel both Queensland and the world.
| To dig further into this history, readers can explore Queensland’s coal archives, Trove’s newspaper collections, and local museums such as the Capella Pioneer Village and Clermont Historical Centre, where the stories of these early discoveries still live on. |
Image caption: Blair Athol Mine 1979. Image Credit: University of Queensland Library, Michael Keniger, via Queensland Places.
