Well, the good news is I actually left Mt Isa, but not before one final twist of the knife. I’d noticed that one of the leaf springs on the van was a bit skewif, so Lawrence kindly said he’d check it out before I hit the road. Well, just as well.
What I thought was the problem wasn’t THE problem. It was the OTHER side. A leaf on the rear set had broken along with the clampy thing that holds them all in place. So, unrestrained, it had speared up into the chassis. Just shoot me now. But as luck would have it, Lawrence located the one set of 710mm offset springs in Mt Isa and three hours later, I could not see Mt Isa in ANY direction.
I figured it made sense to not wander too far away just yet, so my first stop was the old ghost town of Mary Kathleen 60klms due east. Well, I say ghost town, but that implies something to look at. Mary Kathleen was created out of thin air in 1958 to house workers for the namesake uranium mine. When the mine closed for the second time in 1982 every house was sold and moved off site to either Mt Isa or Cloncurry. A hundred acres of concrete slabs, gum trees and nothing else. Still, nirvana for free campers and only 6klms from the mine site.
The access road to the pit was potholed bitumen and those 6klms took about 20minutes to navigate (lucky I had experience driving on rural Victorian roads). I left early, not sure what was the best time for pics. But with that heat sink embedding itself across northern Australia, ‘early’ it was going to be regardless.
The early start was rewarded. The colours tend to ‘burn off’ once the sun hits the rockface, so it was an opportunity to enjoy the contrasts of the mine wall. To give you some idea of the pit size, those blurry specks at the very top are fully grown gum trees. All that excavation for under 10,000 tons of uranium ore. All access roads have been blocked off with boulders into the pit itself, but improvised walking tracks make light work of these.
There are of course warning signs, especially about the water. Judging by the amount of kangaroo and wallaby tracks down to the waters edge, I’m guessing that they’re not hard to spot at night. I haven’t seen a sign yet that I couldn’t ignore, but on this occasion, having someone telling me that I’m glowing, would not be a compliment.
I guess there’s only so many pics you can take of a hole in the ground, so after a goodly hour and a bit, I drove back to the van, hitched her back up, and headed off to my next destination just down the road, Clem Walton Park. While it sounds non-descript, this is a classic case of “location, location, location”. You’ll meet some old ‘friends’ of mine, some old mines and the star of Outback Crystal Hunters. Oh, and we discover the wildlife again.
