Cook Shire Council Chambers is a heritage-listed former town hall and now museum at 121 Charlotte Street, Cooktown, Shire of Cook, Queensland, Australia. It was built from 1876 to 1877 by Henry J Meldrum and John Sullivan. It was also known as Cooktown Post and Telegraph Office and is now known as Cooktown History Centre. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 8 April 1997.
Cooktown History Centre
Operated by the Cooktown and District Historical Society, the Cooktown History Centre features photographs and displays about the area's history and culture. Exhibits include the railway, early roads, cyclones and other disasters, early pioneer families and local indigenous people. The Centre also houses archives of local history.
History
The former Cook Shire Council Chambers was constructed in 1876-77 as Cooktown's first purpose-built Post and Telegraph Office. Its function changed to that of municipal council offices in 1893, and it has retained this function for over a century.
The building is one of the earliest surviving in Cooktown, which was founded in October 1873 as the Endeavour River port for the important Palmer River goldfields. Cooktown developed almost overnight as a port and supply and administrative centre. Within six months of its establishment, the town had 20 restaurants, 12 large and 20 smaller stores, 6 butchers, 5 bakers, 3 tinsmiths, and chemists, fancy-goods shops, watchmakers, bootmakers and saddlers; 65 publican's licenses had been issued for the Cooktown-Palmer River district, with 30 more applied for by April 1874. There was an estimated 3,000 floating population in the town itself, and thousands of men en route to the goldfields. Two Cooktown newspapers were established in 1874, a state school, customs house, court house, and several churches were erected by 1875, and the town was declared a municipality on 5 April 1876. The 1876 census revealed a population of over 9,200 persons on the then extensive Palmer goldfields, and the town of Cooktown had a population of just under 2,200.
An unofficial post office was established in Cooktown from 1 January 1874, and became official later in the year. A line for the telegraph from Cooktown to Maytown, west on the Palmer goldfields, was opened on 25 April 1876.
Tenders for the Cooktown Post and Telegraph Office were called in the last quarter of 1875, but difficulties in letting the contract necessitated the tenders being re-advertised in March 1876. Finally the contract was let in July 1876 to Cooktown contractor Henry J Meldrum, who tendered with a price of . Meldrum disappeared later in the year, believed drowned, and the work was completed by Cooktown builder John Sullivan in June 1877.
At this period, Queensland post and telegraph offices were designed in the office of the colonial architect, FDG Stanley. As colonial architect, Stanley also designed the Cooktown Powder Magazine (1874) and the first wing of the Cooktown Hospital (1879), and in private practice prepared plans for St Mary's Convent at Cooktown (1888–89) (now Cooktown Museum, formerly James Cook Historical Museum) and the former Cooktown Queensland National Bank [1890-92] (now Westpac Bank Building, Cooktown). When plans were being prepared for the Cooktown Post and Telegraph Office in 1875, Queensland post and telegraph services were still operating independently, the two not amalgamated until 1879, but for economy were likely to be located in the same building. The Cooktown Post and Telegraph Office therefore provided for separate post and telegraph offices and separate residences for the postmaster and telegraph office master, back-to-back in a single, mirror-imaged, timber building. Compared with earlier designs, which were little more than cottages with one room or an enclosed verandah serving as a post or telegraph office, mid-1870s designs provided more generous space for post and telegraph functions. However, the Cooktown building soon proved inadequate for the volume of mail and telegraph services being demanded.