Development
The New England Highway, Gore Highway and the Warrego Highway traverse the region. The Leslie Dam, Storm King Dam and the Glenlyon Dam are some of the major water storage facilities in the area.
The Queensland Gas Pipeline oil pipeline and the Roma to Brisbane Pipeline, Australia's first natural gas pipeline both cross the region from west to east. There are a few coal mines and a number of power stations situated on the Downs, including the Millmerran Power Station, Oakey Power Station, Darling Downs Power Station and the Kogan Creek Power Station.
Before European settlement many areas on the Darling Downs were fertile wilderness. For example around Ma Ma Creek, rich swampy wetlands provided a haven for many animal species not currently found on the downs. The Hopping mouse and Paradise Parrot have both become extinct since cattle farming begun.
The Dingo Fence starts at the town of Jimbour across the country to the Great Australian Bight.
Read more about this topic: Darling Downs
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“Every new development for the last three centuries has brought men closer to a state of affairs in which absolutely nothing would be recognized in the whole world as possessing a claim to obedience except the authority of the State. The majority of people in Europe obey nothing else.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)
“The Cairo conference ... is about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“I can see ... only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.”
—H.A.L. (Herbert Albert Laurens)