Birdsville Races
annual horse race in Australia
The Birdsville Races are horse races held each year in September in the Queensland, Australia, town of Birdsville. Funds are raised in aid of the Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia. The population is swelled from about 100 to around 7,000 people for the two-day event.
As Birdsville is very remote, many travellers come by air and hundreds of aircraft fill the town's airstrip. The town of Quilpie celebrates the event by welcoming travellers who are heading westwards to Birdsville by road.
In 2009 as part of the Q150 celebrations, the Birdsville Races were announced as one of the Q150 Icons of Queensland for its role as an "event and festival".
History
The first races were run in the town in 1882. The club that convened the meeting was originally called the Birdsville Amateur Turf Club. It later changed to the Diamantina Amateur Race Club as it also convened the Betoota race meeting. In 1990 it separated from Betoota and became the Birdsville Race Club Incorporated.
“Birdsville Races” enters the record as annual horse race in Australia. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Birdsville, Races and annual can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 15, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4916154. Authority coordinates are -25.917, 139.383. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2009, 1882 and 1990.
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This entry incorporates text from “Birdsville Races” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.