CQUniversity Australia is a public University operating under the Queensland Government's Central Queensland University Act.

We were founded in 1967 in Rockhampton as the Queensland Institute of Technology (Capricornia) and introduced distance education in 1974. We pioneered a mixed‐study mode which diminished distinctions between fulltime and part‐time and on‐campus and off‐campus study. It enabled us to serve a dispersed Central Queensland population. Between 1978 and 1989 we established campuses in Central Queensland at Gladstone, Mackay, Bundaberg and Emerald, achieving university status in January 1992. An additional learning site was established in Noosa in 2001. In 1994 with a full-time student load of 5 000, we expanded, establishing our first on-shore teaching site for international students in Sydney in 1994, then Melbourne in 1997, followed by Brisbane in 1998 and the Gold Coast in 2001. By 2006 we were acknowledged as the largest provider of education to international students studying on-shore in Australia.

Today we enrol about 20 000 students annually. While CQUniversity is based in regional Queensland, half of our students are taught at sites in the central business districts of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and at the Gold Coast. Those students are cared for by a wholly-owned commercial subsidiary of CQUniversity, so we are not entirely a public university in the conventional sense. In fact, only a third of our total revenue (total revenue $249m according to our 2007 Annual Report) is derived from Australian Government grants, among the least of any other public university in Australia.

Since 1967 when we were the Queensland Institute of Technology (Capricornia), CQUniversity has been known by at least 4 other brand names including The Capricornia Institute of Advanced Education, The University College of Central Queensland, The University of Central Queensland and Central Queensland University.