Cooktown Chinese Temple and the Palmer River Goldrush

Cooktown had a sizable Chinese population at the height of the Palmer River Gold Rush in the late 1800s. Chinese miners and workers, mainly from the Guangdong Province, rushed first to the southern states and then to Far North Queensland, after gold was first discovered in the Palmer River region in 1873. Local historians Bev Shay and John Shay note that by July 1875 the Chinese population on the Palmer was 9,000 and had grown to 18,000 by 1876 and 19,500 in 1877, constituting 90% of the entire Palmer population.ⁱ

Cooktown became a bustling community, and while no buildings remain, large, old, mango and lychee trees still stand in Cooktown’s main Charlotte Street and the former Adelaide Street Chinatown, and in the Cooktown botanical gardens, which are on the site of a former Chinese market garden with elaborate stone irrigation channels. Cooktown also had two Chinese temples, established around 1875 and 1892.ⁱⁱ The Adelaide Street temple’s caretaker, Ah Gum, looked after the temple until 1938.ⁱⁱⁱ

The Lit Sing Goong Cooktown Chinese Temple collection of artefacts are housed in the Cooktown Museum. Photograhs reveal the Temple initially housed the three dieties Lu Dongbing, Kuan Ti and Buk Ti.^iv The temple artefacts include an elaborate temple frieze, complete with lucky bats, and Buddhist symbols such as the lotus flower and eternal knot. The collection also has a scroll of the bodhisattva of compassion, Guan Yin, which is a later addition.

There were many Far North Chinese Temples, including at the nearby Palmer River settlement, and in Cairns, Port Douglas, Atherton, Herberton, Innisfail and Townsville.^v

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(Image: Freeman Trebilcock, Filip Milovac)

Temple bell from the Lit Sung Goong Temple in Cooktown, at Cooktown Museum. (Image: Freeman Trebilcock, Filip Milovac)

A brick with the Chinese writing 'Buddha blesses Mr Lee' in Cooktown Museum. (Image: Freeman Trebilcock, Filip Milovac)

References

1 Bev Shay and John Shay, The Chinese on the Goldfields (The Cooktown Historical Society n.d.)

2 Gordon Grimwade, “Worshiping the North: Early Chinese Temples in Mainland

Tropical Australia,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 29 (2025): 491–527, Grimwade notes these dates are indicative.

3 Jack Forster Waltham, Chinese Temples of Australia. (Flinders University, 2014); “Chinese in Cooktown Have No Temple Now,” The Courier-Mail, August 18, 1938, 3.

4 Grimwade, “Worshiping the North”.

5 Grimwade, “Worshiping the North”; Waltham, Chinese Temples of Australia.