St George is a rural town and locality in the Shire of Balonne, Queensland, Australia. It is the administrative centre for the Shire of Balonne. In the , St George had a population of 3,130 people. Geography The town is due west of Brisbane and the Gold Coast and sits just inside the region of South West Queensland, Australia. St George is on the Balonne River which is reputedly an excellent fishing site for fish such as Yellowbelly and Murray Cod. It sits at the junction of several highways including the Castlereagh Highway, the Moonie Highway, the Carnarvon Highway and the Balonne Highway. The only crossing of the Balonne River is the Andrew Nixon Bridge on the Balonne Highway. History Aboriginal people The present township of St George was founded on the boundaries of three Aboriginal cultural groups, the Mandandanji to the north, the Kooma to the south-west and the Bigambul to the south-east. These people of the Balonne River fished with hoop nets and hunted ducks and marsupials for meat. They supplemented their diet with the small native melons that grew in abundance in the area, and with yams dug out from the flats along the riverbanks. Their funeral rites consisted of constructing an elevated bark platform on which the deceased would be placed, with fires lit underneath to smoke and preserve the corpse. The mummified remains would then be wrapped in bark and possum cloaks and carried with care by the relatives until they were deposited in a hollow of a tree. Surrounding trees were marked and decorated. British colonisation In 1845, pastoralist squatters John Gordon Town and Christopher Bagot entered the vicinity looking for land to take up for cattle. The local Commissioner for Crown Lands, Roderick Mitchell conducted an expedition along the Balonne River later that year, taking the name for the river from the Aboriginal residents. In 1846, the site where the town of St George now stands was Major Thomas Mitchell's Camp VIII of his expedition into northern Australia. He noticed the natural rocky ford across the Balonne River on St George's Day, 23 April, thereby naming the site St George's Bridge. He directed his second-in-charge Edmund Kennedy to construct a cattle depot there while he explored further north. Kennedy and his stockmen remained at St George's Bridge for around a month. In 1847, the first cattle stations were established: Burgorah (also known as