Gayndah is a rural town on the Burnett River, where it is joined
by Oakey Creek, 110 km west of Maryborough and 250 km north-west
of Brisbane.  The Gayndah district was settled as a part of the
great pastoral expansion of the late 1840s, and Archer's Lookout
near the Gayndah high school marks a hill memorialised as the
place where Thomas Archer surveyed the Burnett Valley. In 1849
the New South Wales government was planning a mail run to
'Gayndah on the Burnett'. It is thought that the name was of
Aboriginal derivation, referring either to an endemic tree
species or to thunder. The settlement at this time consisted of
a straggling township with a few hotels, a court house and a
post office, and Gayndah was gazetted as a town in 1852.  By the
early 1860s there were a hospital, a primary school (1863),
Baptist and Catholic churches and a temporary school of arts.
The township was made a municipality in 1866, coinciding with
gold discoveries to the west at Eidsvold. Eidsvold's fortune was
too distant to benefit