Towns in Australia

Exploring Australia, town by town

Mundubbera QLD

Mundubbera

Postcode: 4626

Mundubbera is a town in the Wide Bay Burnett region of Queensland, Australia. The town is located on the Burnett Highway, 405 kilometres north west of the state capital, Brisbane and 200 kilometres west of the regional centre, Bundaberg. Mundubbera is built on the bank on the Burnett River. At the 2001 census, the town had a population of 1,226.

Mundubbera is the self proclaimed “Citrus Capital of Queensland”, although this is disputed by the neighbouring (and rival) town of Gayndah.

Mundubbera means either Footsteps in the trees or Meeting Place of the waters in the local Aboriginal language.The latter name refers to the confluence of the Burnett, Auburn and Boyne rivers just upstream from Mundubbera.

European settlement took place in the late 1840s. Closer settlement, involving migrants from Germany, Britain and the Netherlands, did not take place until the early 1900s and the town was established in its existing site prior to World War I. The railway arrived in 1914.

Henry Zipf planted the first citrus orchards in 1933 and established Mundubbera as a major producer of export citrus.

The recent (2006) drought and the after effects of the 2004 Citrus canker outbreak in Emerald, Queensland has had a dampening effect of the citrus industry in the area.

At the 2001 national census there were 2,419 persons resident in Mundubbera, 4.6% of those of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander ancestry. 7.6% of Mundubbera residents were born overseas.