Download coordinates as: Ayr is a rural town and locality in the Shire of Burdekin, Queensland, Australia.

[10] The first British exploration of the area occurred in 1839 during the third voyage of HMS Beagle where Captain John Clements Wickham travelled 10 miles up the waterway later known as the Burdekin River.

His progress was stopped by a fishing weir built by the local Aboriginal people that spanned the river.

[11] In 1843, during the surveying voyage of HMS Fly, Lieutenant John Ince, Joseph Jukes and Frederick Evans sailed up the river near to where the town of Ayr is now located.

They encountered two large tribes of Aboriginal people with whom they had friendly interactions, exchanging items and participating in an apparent Welcome to Country ceremony.

[12] Shipwreck survivor James Morrill lived with Aboriginal people in the region for seventeen years from 1846 when he was washed ashore on a makeshift raft.

Morrill lived a traditional Aboriginal lifestyle and later made a culturally and historically important record of his experiences.

[13] In 1859, Henry Daniel Sinclair, James Gordon and Ben Poole conducted a sea voyage that examined the mouth of the Burdekin River.

They travelled about 8 miles up the river but were afraid to explore further as they were wary of the resident Aborigines and had limited firearms.

[14] George Elphinstone Dalrymple led an overland expedition to the area in 1859 looking for land acquisitions and he returned again in 1860 as the head of a seagoing exploratory party.

[15] In 1862, Dalrymple made another journey to the lower Burdekin region concluding that the "richly grassed open forest country" would become "a most valuable addition to the pastoral and agricultural resources of the colony.

[17] In 1862, he selected a large area of land along the lower Burdekin River for a sheep station which he named Jarvisfield after the Antill family estate near Picton.

[18] Groups of armed settlers and Native Police started to force the Aboriginal people off the land around this time, with James Morrill documenting a massacre of a resident Burdekin River tribe.

Antill bore a life-long scar on his forehead from a boomerang thrown at him during one of these episodes of frontier violence.

[18] Morrill attempted to negotiate a treaty between the British and the Aborigines whereby the coastal area on the north side of the Burdekin would be a reserve for the Indigenous people but this was ignored by the authorities.

[20] In retribution for murders and cattle spearing, punitive expeditions by the Native Police led by Lieutenant John Marlow would "disperse" the local Aboriginal population.

[27] Large scale cultivation of sugarcane began in the region in 1879 with the formation of the Burdekin Delta Sugar Company through the partnership of local landholders Robert William Graham and Archibald Campbell MacMillan.

In 1882, John Spiller and Henry Brandon established the Pioneer plantation which was soon sold to the Drysdale brothers.

[39][40] In 1926 Annie Dennis founded the Burdekin Community Church as a Pentecostal mission for South Sea Islanders.

[43] In June 2018, the town become the centre of controversy when a racist poster was displayed in a shop window, asserting that foreigners and backpackers were not welcome.

Within hours, Burdekin Shire Council Mayor Lyn McLaughlin condemned the people responsible for the poster.

A mostly two-laned highway, it is the major road of the Burdekin, linking Ayr with nearby Brandon and Home Hill.

Ayr Railway Station is the town's rail-transit stop with regular services from Brisbane to Cairns.