TRACKING THROUGH COPPER COUNTRY ALONG THE MATILDA HIGHWAY.

1^st September to 4^th September Winton to Cloncurry

We left Winton on the First day of Spring, although it felt like the first day of summer as the temperature rose to 34 degrees, no complaints though as we broke out the shorts and thongs. This was what we had come for.

The landscape from Winton was rather non descript, flat, desolate and very dusty, but that’s to be expected in a desert region that is also suffering from a drought. Mile after mile of nothing…… until we drove into the “town” of McKinlay.

This town has a star in its tiny centre…….. the pub where the movie, “Crocodile Dundee” was filmed, so we did what every patriotic Aussie would do. We stopped to have drink with Mick Dundee.

 Only problem was he had just left town and we only had the barman to talk to. It didn’t stop us from buying a drink of course. Paul reckons its always beer o’clock some where.

Once refreshed by the amber fluid we continued on towards Cloncurry which is the first major town in the very rich mining area of Outback Queensland. The scenery began to change as the flat horizon developed bumps, mesas and finally quite steep rugged ranges, which are obviously loaded with huge deposits of copper, lead, zinc, gold and uranium. Why do I say loaded? Probably because of the high number of ore bearing monster road trains we passed.

I remember when at primary school during social studies we had to pinpoint towns on a map of Australia and label them with the ore that was mined there.

One of those towns was Mary Kathleen. The ore…. Uranium.  I remember a lot of controversy about Australia mining the fuel for “Atomic” bombs and it was this controversy that led to the closure of the mine in 1984.

The town of Mary Kathleen had been purpose built in 1958, so it was planned around a civic centre, shopping and services centre, modern school and sporting facilities. When the town was closed, every thing was sold.

 It is now a famous ghost town where the footings of every building are still set out in the streets, bitumen roads edged in concrete gutters still drain the water to the creek, in fact it as a one dimension plan of Mary Kathleen.

The original entrance to the town of Mary Kathleen

Centre of town and the original fountain, the only 3D structure left in the town

Paul standing on the original tiled floor of the Health Centre.

We drove out to the old mine site where again the remnants of the infrastructure needed to run a huge mine can be seen and their purpose identified.

And so onwards to the very mine, and despite the warnings we followed the well-worn track taken by many tourists to the still large open cut mine area.

Self explanatory but obviously not always heeded

The mine itself is still overwhelming in its size and one can only imagine the amount of uranium that was removed from this site.

We thoroughly enjoyed our stay at Cloncurry and I have one last gem of information about this town.

PIES, MEAT PIES, GOOD OLD AUSTRALIAN MEAT PIES. The best meat pies we have ever had came from the local Cloncurry bakery.