Royal Hotel, Birdsville linked to pedal generators, the others being placed at 4 head stations in far western Queensland and at the Aboriginal Mission at Mornington Island, with base station VJI established at Cloncurry. For the first 18 months, communication was by Morse code, but the system proved enormously popular, and soon revolutionised outback communications. Importantly, Birdsville became reliably connected to the station properties in the Diamantina district, and with the new Aerial Medical Service, established by Flynn in 1928 under the auspices of the AIM, and based at Cloncurry. In 1934, nursing sisters Edna McLean and Amy Bishop of the AIM's Birdsville
Cloncurry Courthouse not reached until the early twentieth century. The township of Cloncurry was established in the early 1870s to serve a remote and isolated area in the far north west of Queensland. It was officially declared a Country Post Office in 1871, and in 1872 a general store and a hotel were opened. Early transportation was by horse, bullock and camel teams, and later by Cobb & Co coaches.The Great Northern railway line to the east coast was not extended to Cloncurry until December 1908. Cloncurry prospered in the 1880s, when prices for pastoral produce remained buoyant and mining activity increased.