North Queensland's capital and the gateway to Magnetic Island — where Townsville sits at the base of Castle Hill (a distinctive pink granite monolith rising 286 metres directly behind the city centre that is the defining landmark of North Queensland), the Strand (a 2.2 km waterfront promenade with the largest artificial coral reef lagoon in the Southern Hemisphere — a saltwater lagoon stinger-netted for year-round swimming beside the Great Barrier Reef coast), Magnetic Island (the island within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, 20 minutes by ferry, where wild koalas live in eucalyptus trees near the beach and 5 of Australia's clearest wreck dives are within 5 km of shore) makes Townsville the most accessible Great Barrier Reef base in Australia, and the Museum of Underwater Art (MOUA) — the world's largest underwater sculpture gallery — is sited on the ocean floor between Townsville and Magnetic Island
Townsville (200,000 city; 250,000 metro) is the largest city in tropical north Queensland and the largest urban centre in northern Australia north of Brisbane — a significant Defence Force base, a James Cook University city, and the commercial hub for the North Queensland coast including the Burdekin, Tablelands, and Gulf Country. Townsville's position at the southern margin of the wet tropics gives it the lowest rainfall of any major tropical Australian city.
The Townsville area was the country of the Wulgurukaba (Canoe people — people of the sea channel) and Bindal peoples before European settlement. The coastal plain at the base of Castle Hill was recognised as a potential port site by John Melton Black and Robert Towns in the 1860s, and Townsville was gazetted as a town in 1865. Towns himself was a major figure in the Queensland blackbirding trade — the forced recruitment of Melanesian (South Pacific Islander) workers for the Queensland sugar industry — which forms a deeply troubling part of Townsville's founding commercial history. The city gr…