[1] Places names used in the area over time have included "of the Bet Bet", Chinaman's Flat, Butcher's Bridge, Cox'sTown/Coxtown, Upper, Central, and New Chinaman's, Leviathan Reef, Timor Creek/Lower Alma, Lime Kiln Plains/Timor West, Dwyer's Bridge, Bowenvale, and Timor.

[2][3][4] Much historic documentation, especially maps,[5] includes the word lead, representing an underground line of gold deposits.

The Charlotte Plains and Norwood sheep run areas were in the area of the Loddon Protectorate, founded by Assistant Protector Edward Stone Parker, firstly on the Loddon River at Neereaman in 1840, but after a dry season, which was wrongly thought to be typical, moved it further south, upstream, to Willam-e-barramul [place of the emu] now Franklinford.

The comments made about the region's indigenous people by Norwood pastoral squatter (from January 1852), Alfred Joyce, in his reminiscences, give some insight into tensions of early colonisation.

This name came from the groups of Chinese immigrants largely from Guangdong Province in southern China who made up a significant proportion of the early gold-seekers there.

[12] In October 1856, a major rush to a particular point on the Chinaman's Flat Lead began, resulting in the co-incidental discovery of a gold-bearing quartz rock reef later named the Leviathan.

the west side including shops, a church of the Primitive Methodist denomination, a Post Office named Chinaman's Flat, and at least one private school, George Hesketh's.

The east side, also called Chinaman's Flat,[14] was spread along the main Maryborough to Dunolly via the Butcher's Bridge/CoxTown track, was more commercial, and included a substantial privately-owned, Mechanics Hall (not Institute) as part of an hotel's business, and a Church and Hall of the Wesleyan Methodist denomination.

Gradually the deep mines were overwhelmed by underground water, in spite of increasingly large pumping plants.

The extraction of gold from many heaps of mullock (waste material from the mines), using cyanide and a far smaller workforce, lasted much longer.

[25] At Easter 1926, a memorial, without names, to the large number of local men and the woman who had volunteered to serve in World War I was unveiled in Bowenvale, attended by hundreds, many of them part of the "Back to Maryborough District" excursion, mainly transported (to Maryborough) by special trains, popular at the times.

[26] Not long after, a solid-brick Catholic Church, to replace the earlier weatherboard one on the north side of the Creek, was erected nearby, in Timor.

The landscape of the Bowenvale-Timor area includes residential and agricultural buildings as well as evidence of the past, including tall mining ruins and foundations, substantial dams and drainage channels, eroded mullock heaps, abandoned sports facilities, and depressions, evidence of cellars and underground tanks, known as "wells".

Also in Timor are a Bills horse trough, and the now-closed general store-post office, the oldest part being built in 1870-71.

The two huge wet-mine beam-pump fulcrums, the granite one on the south side of the bridge, the basalt one on private land to the north, mark the sites of their former very deep-lead mines.

The Timor-Bowenvale Cemetery was gazetted on 13 January 1868,[28] for its location in then Chinaman's Flat near the northern edge of the civil Parish of Maryborough.