Mt Isa

Mt Isa is in the far west of Queensland and is the last town before the Northern Territory border. It was founded in the 1920s after a gold prospector accidentally found lead instead. Since then, the mine has proved to be one of the most productive in the world, producing lead, silver and copper in staggering quantities. The town has a population of more than 20,000 and provides the full gamut of shopping and services.

We're now more than 500km north of the Tropic of Capricorn, and while Mt Isa is still fairly dry, it gets enough rain in the northern wet season to fill up the local dam, so the locals don't seem to think twice about using sprinklers on their lawn or washing their cars. As a consequence it is much greener here than we have seen for a while, and the caravan park is well grassed.

Not unexpectedly, most of the tourist things to do in town revolve around mining. We spent a couple of hours at the history display at the tourist information centre, and about 10 minutes walking around the rather dull 'outback garden' attached. Because of issues with insurance, the mine no longer runs underground tours, but they have built a tourist mine at the information centre. This was built using actual mine machinery and volunteer miner labour, and is supposedly an exact replica of the real mine (except it only goes underground about 22 metres, instead of over 2 kilometres for the real mine). The mine tunnels are very tall and wide, to allow for the huge machinery that has replaced the old pick and shovel in modern mines. As you can see in the photo, we had to get kitted out in the full rig of overalls, gumboots and hard hat (with light, the battery of which is incredibly heavy and clips onto the back of the special belt).

We were underground for nearly 2 hours, then all piled back into the cage (elevator) for the trip back to the surface. We got no more than a metre off the ground when we abruptly lost power and the cage shuddered to a halt. Luckily it wasn't a full tour, there were 11 of us packed in and as you can see from the photo it isn't a very big space. At first we thought the guide was playing a game, but it quickly became obvious that we really were stranded. It also became obvious fairly quickly that the guide didn't have a clue how to get us going again. After about 10 minutes the guide contacted someone above ground for instructions, and eventually when we still weren't going anywhere the other person said they would come down. John isn't very good in confined spaces and by this time he was looking fairly green. The guide opened the hatch in the ceiling and we all peered up at the open air 20 metres above, until the other person appeared on the ground in front of the cage. More instructions followed, culminating in the guide using the 'hand brake' to gently lower us back down to ground level, and us all getting out and walking up the emergency exit path out. Quite an exciting finish to the tour!


When we first arrived in Mt Isa we were told at the information centre that the above ground

tours of the actual mine area weren't running for at least another 2 weeks. However while we were chatting with our fellow tourists waiting to be rescued from the cage we found that in fact a mine tour was running the following day, so we signed ourselves up. Despite the fact that most of the action takes place underground, there was still quite a lot to see, as the various minerals are separated and processed before being sent to Townsville for shipping overseas. In the photo in front of the information centre above you can see a replica of molten copper pouring out of the pot, the photo at right here shows the real thing. Interestingly, the morning we did the tour it was announced that the copper refining plant is going to be closed over the next 5 years, and the ore would be shipped straight overseas for processing, so tourists in a few years time won't get to see this.

Amongst all the mining attractions we also visited a couple of other Mt Isa sights. Winton doesn't have a monopoly on fossils, there has been a rich find of megafauna fossils at Riversleigh, about 270 km north of Mt Isa. Rather than going all the way out there to look at the hole in the ground where the fossils used to be, we visited the very interesting display which had videos and dioramas as well as some of the actual fossils, and recreations of the original animals.

We also went to the underground hospital, which was built in the second world war in case the Japanese bombed Mt Isa. The war never came that far south and the tunnels were never used, except apparently for night shift nurses who used them as a cool place to nap in the searing summer heat.

Finally we had a couple of games of golf, on a course that was surprisingly green and well grassed.