Date Tags 2002au

Mt Isa and Cloncurry, Queensland

We investigate the country east of Mt Isa--the old uranium mine and town of Mary Katherine, now abandoned, and the town of Cloncurry.

Mt Isa to Cloncurry is 117km. You can do it in a bit over an hour if you hurry, but we found there was a lot more to see on this section than we thought--in fact, it was much more interesting than almost any day on Cape York.

Our first stop was the former town of Mary Katherine: a modern ghost town. This was a late 1950's planned town to support the uranium mine 5 kilometers north of town. There's nothing left now... in 1982 the town permanently shut down, the buildings were auctioned off, and all that remains today are the paving on the streets and sidewalks, and the floor tiles in the old buildings. It's a great place to walk around: all the old buildings were arranged around a square, and someone has spray painted the building's purpose on their floors. Over here is the post office, over there is the library, there's the wet canteen, the ANZ bank is here. All the residential streets are there too, with their carport floors still intact, and nothing else. It's a fun place to poke around.

Then, we headed into Cloncurry, where they have all the old memorabilia from Mary K. It was a good poke around. We also wandered over to the cemetery to look at Afghan graves. Back in the good olde days, camels were used here as transport, and Afghans were their drivers.

With that done, there wasn't much else to see... so we headed back. I had spotted the location of the uranium mine on a map in the museum, and I pushed an extremely reluctant Chris to drive me up to it. It's a big open pit mine, 2 km across and 1 km wide, with a blue pool of water at the bottom. Chris was a bit worried about getting radioactive. I just didn't worry about it. Maybe I should have?

To celebrate the 4th of July, we planned to eat at Los Arcos Mexican Restaurant. Sadly, it was closed, so we settled for the Schnitzel House across the street, where we had real German beer and the meal for two, with four different kinds of schnitzel and a few other treats. Yum! It was really quite tasty, and not what you'd expect to find in a town in the middle of the Australia Outback.

And that was about it.


Weird Wildlife Sighting

Nothing much