Mary Kathleen
Mary Kathleen. Our first stop was Mary Kathleen, but this was very different to what we had researched, especially in regards to vehicle access. We read that there was a good sealed road all the way into the town and mine, so we went in with the caravan attached.Mary Kathleen was a mining settlement in the northwestern part of Queensland, Australia. It was first settled during the 1860s. Uranium was first discovered at Mary Kathleen by Clem Walton and Norm McConachy in 1954. The deposit and the township was named after the late wife of McConachy. A sales contract with the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority was signed in 1956. Mining commenced at the end of 1956 and the treatment plant was commissioned in June 1958. The project was developed by Mary Kathleen Uranium Limited (MKU) at a cost of A$24 million. By 1963 the major supply contract had been satisfied ahead of schedule, and large reserves of ore lay at grass. Consequently, the works were closed down. The mine then lay idle until 1974, when it was reopened. New supply contracts with Japanese, German and American power utilities prompted this re-opening, with Mary Kathleen's second life extended to 1982 when reserves were finally exhausted.The town is 6km away from the mine, and had a post office, cinema, sports ovals, a school, banks and a community store. The state school was opened in July 1956, followed by a temporary hospital facilities and a community store. In 1961, about 1000 people lived here in this new town. It was well designed and the same model was used at other locations. When the mine re-opened in mid-1974, the population at Mary Kathleen subsequently grew from 80 in August 1974 to 700 in August 1975 and peaked at approximately 1200 in 1981.Taken today from the same location as the above photo looking towards the general storeIt was a fascinating place and we all enjoyed looking around. No buildings stood there anymore, but their floors remained. There were maps and some pictures there, so we enjoyed finding the bank, the general store and the post office and looking around them. Some still had their floor tiles still there. You could see where all the homes were, as only concrete pads remained, making them ideal for caravan's. It actually looked like a caravan park at one point.The road to the town was a little rough, but it was nothing on the current road condition from the town to the mine.As no one lives here anymore, it is now a labeled as a Ghost Town.MineAgain, taking the caravan along with us (as we were told it was easy access), Jacinda did some major 4x4ing, the most she has ever done with a non-4x4 caravan attached. She did very well. As we were a long way off the main road now, it was hard to know how much further we had to go, was it worth going in and seeing it, and should we have disconnected the caravan and driven the rest.The further we went in, the more reluctant we were to stop. We wanted to keep going. Eventually someone stopped on the way out and advised us of the road up ahead. They thought it was odd we were taking a caravan in, and I think some other 4x4ers thought they were doing some great skilful driving, until they saw us driving along the same track with a caravan connected.But it was so worth doing. The water was a deeper blue than the blue lake in Mount Gambier. It was fantastic to see it on a cloudy day there was no doubt it was blue all on its own, no reflecting the blue sky here today. The place echo-ed for ages. You could tell a lot of work had been done here, and it was so worth seeing. The only problem we then had, we trying to get back out again.
A total of 31 million tonnes of ore were extracted from the mine until it was exhausted. Processing occurred on-site.