We got up early to give us enough time to walk to the Hard Times Mine for an underground mine tour. The main mine no longer runs mine tours after a visitor broke a leg and sued the company. So the Mayor and some retired miners got some funding and created their own mine. We had Bill as our guide. He had worked underground in the big mine for 30 years and had dug out the Hard Times mine so he had plenty of stories to tell. If you look closely you can see women’s bras strung together. This is part of a larger plan to set a Guinness Book of Records record.
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| A couple of GITMO refugees! |
But first we had to dress up like inmates of Guantanamo Bay! We weren’t allowed to take cameras underground. Bill took us down in a cage and then we walked through the 1km of underground tunnels that demonstrated the main features of underground mining. We all had our own miners lamps as it was pitch black. Bill operated a pneumatic mucking out machine and we all had a go at using a pneumatic drill: all very noisy. Bill also drove one of the big face shovels that made the ground shake. We ended up in a Crib room having a cup of tea and examining some big pieces of lead and copper ore. The lead ore was extraordinarily heavy.
We also had a look round the Riversleigh Fossil display. Riversleigh is 150 kms north of Mt Isa and contains a huge number of fossils from 15-25 million years ago all buried in limestone. Once the fossil is revealed – usually by blasting – mild acid is used to dissolve the limestone off the fossil. Very intricate bone structures of things like bats can be revealed. We passed a house on the way back to the Irish Club. Quite a fancy garden for Mt Isa which usually have bare dirt or concrete around the house. Mt Isa is a bit down at heel overall like it is expecting hard times. The mine is owned by Glencore a big Swiss resources company. They have brought about many changes and the workforce is half what it used to be and open cut mining is about to expand.
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