Animals, minerals, convivial It is the second biggest city in Australia by area, but many people have never heard of Mount Isa. finds a lot to love about the thriving mining city.
Oliver Lewis
Dressed in an orange jumpsuit, large white gumboots and a hard hat with a torch on the front we descend into the mine.
I’m in Mount Isa, deep in the northwest of the Queensland Outback. It is a city built by mining, rising from the arid red dirt of the landscape in 1923, after prospector John Campbell Miles first discovered lead ore here.
From the air, the land surrounding Mount Isa, or The Isa as it is known by locals, looks like the scarred surface of an alien planet. From my window seat in the plane, the rocks below reflect back beams of light from the setting sun, hinting at the great seams of zinc, copper, lead and silver buried under the dirt.
We’re on the Hard Times Mine Underground Tour, just beside the Outback at Isa visitor centre, in the middle of the city of about 22,000 people. Because of health and safety precautions, tours into the actual mines closed a few decades ago, so the city built its own mock mine, with around 1.2 kilometre of tunnels.
Our tour group is led by Alan Rackham, a miner of 49 years who over the course of the next two-and-a-half hours takes us through the history of mining in the area.
Going down the lift shaft, around 20-30 metres below the surface, I get a faint tinge of claustrophobia, but the area down below is well ventilated. The blasted rock surfaces of the tunnels are covered with wire netting, with thick screw pieces drilled in every metre or so to support the load.
To explain the mining process Rackham employs the metaphor of a street system, with the first tunnel we go down functioning as the main street.
‘‘If you drive into a small town, this is the main street, it’s hooked up to the lift and the air flow,’’ he says.
The smaller tunnels off the sides are suburban streets, access ways to the houses or yards which contain the columns of ore.
‘‘When we get into your yard, we put a tunnel down both of your fence lines and one at the back,’’ he says.
The column then gets blasted out and removed, with more levels created further down to get at the rest of the ore, which Rackham compares to a multi-level carpark.
Throughout the network of tunnels, old mining machinery donated by Mount Isa Mines is scattered around. Each of the tour party strap on ear muffs and has a go on a hand-held borer, a massive drill piece that bites into the rock to stuff in charges.
The night before, fresh off the plane from Brisbane I had woken up from a nap to a huge rumbling noise, which at the time I thought was an earthquake. Apparently though, 8pm is the time the mines set off charges, huge explosions that are capable of shifting hundreds of thousands of tonnes of rock.
The city has a symbiotic relationship with the mines, which are run now by Swiss mining giant Glencore, employing around 4000 people. Those not directly employed by the company either work in supply businesses, or depend on the success of the mineral market for things like accommodation and the money it brings into the town.
My first day in the city, I met Steve Carson, a miner of 44 years who also The mine has one the largest network of underground tunnels in the world, almost 2km deep and stretching to a length of around 1600km. happens to drive a tour bus for North West Tours.
Hopping on the bus along with a bunch of older Australian tourists, Carson introduces himself with a joke, describing how his father decided to uproot the family from England in the 1960s.
‘‘I thought, the old man hasn’t waited for us to die, he’s taken us to hell while we’re still living,’’ he says.
But it quickly becomes apparent just how much he loves the city, and how he cherishes its brief history. Driving through the streets, Carson calls out a running commentary over the intercom laced with jokes and stories about the early mining pioneers.
On flood days, miners used to cross the Leichhardt River and get themselves stranded at hotels and bars so they could spend several boozy days