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Although Matthew Flinders discovered the deep-water harbor of Port Curtis during his reconnaissance of the Australian coasts in 1802, Gladstone (pop. 35,300) remained an unremarkable small town until the second half of the 20th C. Its boom years began in the 1960s with the development of the harbor into one of the best-equipped and busiest in Australia.
The main reason for this growth was the opening up of the immensely rich coalfields of central Queensland, worked by opencast methods. The coal supplies a huge power station in Gladstone and the surplus is exported, mainly to Japan. Gladstone also processes the bauxite worked at Weipa on the Cape York Peninsula, producing aluminum oxide at Parsons Point and then aluminum on Boyne Island. Since aluminum production is highly energy-intensive, the easy accessibility of coal supplies make Gladstone an ideal site for the industry.
A number of old buildings in the modern town bear witness to Gladstone's past, for example the Grand Hotel (1897) and the church of Our Lady Star of the Sea, in a mingling of different styles.
