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The Bedourie Pisé House was built in 1897 as the residence of Mary Brodie, local landowner and proprietor of Bedourie’s Royal Hotel. The use of pisé (rammed earth construction) was an uncommon form of building in Queensland. The building was used as a dwelling, a council meeting place, and possibly a temporary hotel, but fell into disrepair before being purchased by the Diamantina Shire Council and restored in the early 21st century. Moved to stand behind the Pisé House in 2011, the Aboriginal Tracker’s Hut was built at the Bedourie Police Station in 1947 as lodgings for police tracker Doctor Jack and his wife Norah. The shelter is typical of the accommodation standard built for Aboriginal trackers employed by the Queensland police in the 20th century.
The small, isolated town of Bedourie is located near Eyre Creek in the Channel Country flood plains of central western Queensland, approximately 1,130km west of Rockhampton and 1,182km north of Adelaide. The town is on the edge of the traditional lands of the Wangkamadla, Pitta Pitta, Mithaka, and Wangkangurru people. These people retained important knowledge of soaks, vital in the often dry country, and used the major rivers, particularly the Georgina River, as water supply, travel route, and source of Dreaming stories.
The area now encompassing Bedourie was a meeting place, exchange centre and distribution area for pituri, a hallucinogenic plant containing high levels of nicotine. The country between the Georgina and Mulligan rivers was the primary source of pituri, which was used in hunting, ceremonies, and recreationally. This placed it at the centre of an important trade route, with people travelling hundreds of kilometres to the area to exchange high quality stone axes from Cloncurry and Mount Isa, medicines, and sea shells for pituri. The route was also significant for social and ritual trade, where songs, ceremonies, and knowledge were exchanged. Burke and Wills, on their ill-fated 1861 journey through inland Australia, were given food by local Aboriginal people and also "stuff they call bedgery or pedgery" to chew, which Wills found highly intoxicating even in small amounts.
Following European expeditions, pastoralists occupied the Channel Country in the 1860s, stocking runs with cattle and sheep from South Australia. From 1884 Afghan cameleers, following the Aboriginal trade routes, transported goods from the newly-opened Maree railway station in central South Australia, along the Channel Country rivers to Birdsville and Cloncurry. Afghan trading towns sprang up near the present sites of Birdsville and Bedourie, supporting camels transporting stores north and drovers moving stock south to the Adelaide sale yards.
In 1886, a township reserve named Bedouri – reputedly meaning ‘dust storm’ – was proclaimed on Eyre Creek. After locals advised of the flooding risk, a new site was chosen further north, on the road from the Gulf of Carpentaria to Adelaide. Situated about two days’ journey from Boulia in the north and Birdsville to the south, the township was one of six small settlements which became important refreshment and supply sites for surrounding pastoral stations and drovers bound for Adelaide. Blackall merchants AJ Haylock and Co established a general store and hotel in the yet-to-be proclaimed and surveyed township, importing building materials to the sparsely vegetated area. The survey of the township, completed in 1888, shows the location of the hotel, its kitchen, stable and horse yards (Allotment 1 of Section 1), and the store (Allotment 2 of Section 1), but no other structures.
Bedourie developed slowly, with the hotel at its centre. A publican’s licence was issued for the Bedourie hotel, named the Royal, in May 1888, but AJ Haylock and Co advertised the hotel and store for sale or let two months later. The businesses were still unsold in May 1889, when the Bedourie town sites were offered for sale in Birdsville. Eleven allotments, including the hotel, store, and future site of the pisé house, were purchased by Mary Dolan. Born Mary Ballard circa 1858, she had been raised in hotels in Victoria by her twice-widowed mother. In 1883 she married Andrew Carey Dolan, the manager of Breadalbane Station, on the Georgina River, and the couple moved to Birdsville. Andrew Dolan died in 1887, leaving Mary with one child and an £800 estate. The purchase of the Bedourie town land, particularly the hotel and store, enabled Mary to provide an income for herself and her daughter. Mary’s acquisition of the hotel also mirrored a tradition of female publicans in Australia, particularly of widows or deserted wives. Hotel keeping was one of the few occupations women could pursue in the 19th century, allowing childcare from a home base, and granting them legal and economic independence.
By 1891, Mary had become the principal business operator and service provider in Bedourie. Although very few people lived in the town, her hotel served passing drovers, pastoral station occupants, and visiting racegoers who attended Bedourie’s annual horse races, which began in 1887. In addition to being the hotel proprietor, Mary was the town’s postmistress, storekeeper, butcher, and wine and spirit merchant. She also grazed two flocks of sheep around Bedourie, and owned the town’s boat. In 1890, she married John Gray Brodie, of Cluny Station, and the hotel, butcher, store, and wine and spirit businesses were transferred to Brodie from 1892. John Brodie, however, died in January 1895, leaving Mary with a further two children and a third expected. She continued to run the Bedourie businesses, inheriting them along with Brodie’s £500 estate.
In 1897, the value of two of Mary’s previously undeveloped sites (allotments 1 and 2 of section 5), leapt from £60 to £200. The allotments stood opposite the hotel and store on Bedourie’s main street. The hotel and store were destroyed in a storm in October 1897, and the building erected on allotment 1 of section 5 – a small pisé house – may have served as a temporary hotel as well as residence, until a new hotel and store were built in 1898. It featured multiple external doors, and a large room with a fireplace at one end, similar to hotels in remote areas in South Australia.
The house employed an unusual construction method for Queensland, pisé de terre. Often known as pisé or mud construction, pisé de terre is an ancient building method in which loam (earth of low clay content) is rammed into temporary formwork to create rock-like walls. The compaction forces the soil particles together, requiring no additional strengthening. The method was traditionally used in Mediterranean, Central Asian countries, and parts of China, but fell out of use. It was ‘rediscovered’ in France in the mid-18th century, reaching England about 1787, the United States of America around 1810 - 1815 and Australia from the 1820s. It was one of several earthen building construction methods used in Australia, including structures made from mud brick, stones within a mud matrix, cob, adobe, and pisé.
While not widely used across Queensland, the method of pisé construction proved valuable in western Queensland, where building materials were difficult to come by. The limited vegetation provided insufficient material for construction, and while a sandstone quarry existed near Birdsville, allowing residents there to construct stone buildings, Bedourie, surrounded by desert sandhills and stony desert tableland soils, lacked a local stone cache. Pisé construction had several advantages, being ‘less than one-half the cost of Brick or Wood’, ‘equal in appearance and strength to any stone building’, and its material was ‘always procurable’. Pisé had particular benefits in the arid climate of western Queensland: the buildings were not prone to deterioration, and were ‘cool in summer, warm in winter’. A wide array of pisé buildings were constructed in the Channel Country, including Birdsville’s first hotel; Windorah’s original police station (1884); hotels in Jundah, Windorah, and Canterbury; and homestead buildings at Diamantina Lakes, Cullwilla, Daroo, Palpara, Mornay, Saint Albans, Toorajumpa, and Monika.
The ease of construction was another advantage, with minimal equipment and expert knowledge needed. Information on erecting pisé buildings was easily procurable in the 1890s, with contemporary publications and newspapers providing detailed, illustrated instructions on the construction process. A pisé building could be constructed by a single person, though ‘a tradesman who understands the principle of the system and the materials’ was recommended. Publications emphasised the strength and durability of the buildings, so long as a large projecting roof was provided to protect the walls from the weather, with verandahs on all sides also recommended.
In 1899, Mary Brodie married her third husband, James Craigie, owner of Alderley station and ‘uncrowned cattle king’ of Boulia. Craigie relocated his business headquarters to Bedourie in April 1900, and Mary’s property was transferred to James in 1901. Mary briefly moved to Winton in 1902, where she owned and operated the Tattersalls Hotel, but returned to Bedourie in 1904. In her absence, the Bedourie Pisé House was leased to the newly-formed Diamantina Shire Council. Council meetings were held in Bedourie until March 1919, likely all in the pisé house.
The house was – and remained – one of the few buildings in Bedourie, which in December 1904 consisted of a public house, store, blacksmith’s shop, a few dwellings, and a police station. A bore was added in 1905. Despite its small size, however, Bedourie’s attractions drew regular visitors. A traveller in October 1910 described Bedourie as a ‘caravansary… an oasis in the desert’ with hospitality courtesy of the Craigie family, and the town was ‘a favourite resort of cattlemen’. The hotel issued its own currency and the large race-going crowds were managed under the watchful eye of publican ‘Mother Bedourie’. ‘Mother Bedourie’ was compared with the ‘Eulo Queen’ Isabel Gray, also a thrice married publican who operated from a pisé building.
James Craigie died in 1912, and his property was transferred to Mary. Mary transferred her southwest Queensland property to pastoralist Sidney Kidman and retired in 1914 to Brisbane, dying there in 1941. Kidman had acquired a wealth of grazing properties along two major droving paths linking Adelaide and northern Australia, giving rise to his reputation as the ‘Cattle King’. By the time he acquired the Bedourie Hotel and pisé house, he was considering retirement. Kidman installed his cattle property manager, George Gaffney, as manager of the Bedourie Hotel, and Gaffney purchased the Pisé House in 1918, with a substantial mortgage of £1375.
The hotel and Pisé House remained in the ownership and occupation of the Gaffney family and descendants (including the Clanchys and Smiths) for the next several decades. The house, known variously as the ‘Mud House’, ‘Mud Hut’, or ‘The Cottage’, was the family’s residence through the school year. The generator shed and timber power poles behind the house were likely added during this time; Bedourie did not receive electricity until 1970, requiring residents to install their own generators to provide power. A bathhouse was also added.
In 1940, the Bedourie Pisé House was recognised as one of the ‘coolest houses in Queensland’, thanks largely to its pisé construction. Postwar building material shortages sparked a revival in the construction form, which had dwindled in the 20th century, as the cost of importing building materials to western Queensland decreased. By 1911, only 61 pisé houses were identified of Queensland’s 125,800 dwellings. Despite the postwar revival, however, the number of Queensland pisé houses did not significantly grow, and weather, neglect or replacement took their toll on the older pisé buildings.
Bedourie grew from the 1950s, with an airstrip, new residences, and a school constructed. The Diamantina Shire Council re-established itself in Bedourie in 1954, building a new shire hall. The Pisé House occupants departed in 1971, and the house was transferred to the Diamantina Shire Council in 1974. The land was resurveyed and in 1996, new land parcels were created to the south of the existing township, contiguous with the site of the Pisé House and the hotel. By 2002, the chimney and fireplace had been removed, the verandahs enclosed with corrugated iron sheets, and the house had fallen into disrepair. The council began repairs and stabilisation works on the Pisé House in 2003. In 2019, the Pisé House site also includes the generator shed and a bathhouse.
In 2019, both the Pisé House and the tracker’s hut serve as part of the tourist interpretation of Bedourie.
Source: Queensland Heritage Register & "Wills W. Successful exploration through the interior of Australia, from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria." Adelaide: State Library of South Australia; 1996.
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