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Any body that flies into "The Isa"and heads off down the Barkly Hw to Cloncurry will travel through the Selwyn Ranges which are quite impressive at certain times of the year.
Especially if the Spinifex Grass,Gidgie and the Bloodwoods are flowering.The Spiifex covering the slopes of the jump ups and the Gidgie on the flatter areas.
Gidgie being a type of wattle that has very hard timber and was used for fencing,some which can still be seen in the area being 100 to 120 years old,most have been replaced now by steel droppers etc.
Gidgie burns with extreme heat and can melt the bottom out of your billy.The early mines around Cloncurry employed cutters to supply Gidgie to fire their boilers etc
When flowering it gives off a smell like butane gas which is quite strong on a hot still night.Many a Grey Nomad has been fooled thinking their gas bottle is leaking on their caravan,especially at the junction of the Matilda and the Overlanders Hw just out of town.One will stop and look at his gas bottles and others see him doing it and smell the gas and stop and soon you have half a dozen scratching their heads.
Fifty five clicks from Mt Isa on the left is a sealed rd leading into the old Mary Kathleen Uranium mine which
is well worth a look. A K A wrote about it a couple of weeks ago. It was named after the wife of the prospectors wife who died a few weeks before he discovered the mine.
You drive through over grown kerb edging and foundations of a town of over 400 workers some say up to a 1000 lived there at some stage.
They worked the mine in 1954 taking out 4,080 tones and again in 1976 taking a further 4,802 tons of uranium
oxide.31 million tons of ore were removed to get this amount of oxide.
Further on you come to the open cut which is only a short walk from the track. The walls are all different colours and they reflect onto the 60 feet of water in the bottom of the mine. The colours change at different times of the day being at their best after rain with the sun shining on them.
The town was offered to anybody who wanted it,as their was no taker it was put up for auction and every building sold.
In town there is a Museum with a good collection of buildings and plant from the mine.
As you drive down the Hw. dodging the Ernest Henry
road trains carting ore to the smelters in Mt Isa.(They are big but not as big as the ones at Cannington mine east of town) You can see what look like caves in the sides of the jump ups,they are place that the early gougers worked looking for copper and gold etc.
It was hard times then,some had pushed a wheel barrow the 770 km from Townsville to try their luck.Water was almost non existant in those days and what was available was worth more than the copper they were finding.
The ore was sent overseas through Townsville taken there by the Afghans on their camel trains as horses couldn't handle the rough terrain.
Years later it was taken to Mt Isa and this is when a lot of gougers started to dissapear.
Living out in the donger where nobody knew where they had their claims they were tracked down by people who saw what was coming into the smelters and if there was a lot of gold, silver or copper the gouger would go missing and there would be a new owner of the lease.
This was frontier land in those days and with a lot of people moving through the area they would think they had just abandoned the claim and moved on.This went on right up to the Gulf Country. Tim's father told me lots of stories that went on when he was a kid,make the hair stand up on the back of your neck.
In town there is quite a few things to see including the Flying Doctor museum,Cloncurry being the place where the first flight was taken by them in 1928.
If you have time a guided tour of Ernest Henry is a must,see what Rocklands will be like in years to come.
Waynes original headquarters in town was the original John Flynn Hospital moved into town years ago with it unusual air vents and window shutters to try and keep the dust storms out.
Burke and Wills came through the area on their illfated trip to the Gulf
You can watch the sun come up from the lookout and see the colours on the hills or take a drive around the Chinamans Creek Dam.
Cloncurry an interesting town.
Clair Voy.