Heading east from Mt Isa
Trip Start
Mar 11, 2010
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Trip End
Mar 20, 2010
Where I stayed
Tranquil Villas
Mt Isa, Queensland, Australia
Friday, March 12, 2010
Which reminds me, H was surprised when he went to the bottle shop to get some wine and the attendant said because he had walked in, he had to carry the alcohol outside for him. He noticed that the locals hire a taxi just to take them into the drive in bottle shop, then get out just up the road, with their purchases under their arms!!!!
Saturday we headed off to Mary Kathleen, or what remains of Mary Kathleen! I remember learning about the uranium mine there when I was at school, and was shocked to find that it has been closed since 1984, and all the buildings had been auctioned off in Australia's biggest ever auction and all the houses removed. The township is now a ghostly abandoned area with
broken roads that were obviously once well maintained, and acres of grass covered fields dotted with oleander bushes and other botanical reminders that this was once a thriving community of 1,000 people.The open cut mine is visible, it is 1 to 2 km in length and apparently filled with brilliantly aqua coloured water, but we couldn't see it as we only had a normal car and
you needed a 4WD to get right in. We did walk a fair way in, but only managed to get lots of photos of grasshoppers and abandoned concrete structures.
From Mary Kathleen we travelled on the 62km to Cloncurry which proudly proclaims that it has the highest recorded temperature in Australia - 53.1 degrees Celsius on Jan 16, 1889. It was also in Cloncurry that the Royal Flying Doctor Service was born in 1928 and where the first Qantas flight touched down, and at one time Cloncurry was the largest copper producer in the British Empire. We were disappointed to find that the John Flynn Place Museum and
Art Gallery and the Mary Kathleen museum and rock collection were all shut, they only open regularly between May and September.I read that Cloncurry is going to be Australia's first solar powered town once a solar plant is constructed later this year. The countryside is amazingly green, and much hillier than I had expected. It is actually really beautiful with the deep terracotta coloured earth and rocks covered with fresh bright green grasses from the recent rains and lots of different coloured wildflowers and the stark white trunks of the eucalypts which I thought were ghost gums but H tells me are Coolibahs.
