Heading underground reveals the real Mount Isa, discovers Andrew Bain.
There are cities more famous than anything they contain. Mount Isa is one of them. The North Queensland city is so familiar to Australians, it's often known simply by its last name - the Isa - and yet it rarely tops travel itineraries. However, there's an undeniable fascination to a city that's a mine and a mine that's a city. It's also the springboard to one of outback Queensland's most striking natural features.
Closer to Port Moresby than Brisbane, Mount Isa is a place where the visible infrastructure only scratches the surface. So much that's to see here is below the ground. The city was founded after gold prospector John Campbell Miles stumbled across high-quality lead in the area in 1923.
He pegged out a lease and named the place Mount Isa after Mount Ida in Western Australia.
More than 90 years on, minerals still rule the city. Mount Isa Mines employs about 20 per cent of the city's population and the region contains more than 10 per cent of the world's known zinc and lead deposits. The Enterprise mine is Australia's deepest underground mine, reaching a depth of about two kilometres, and there are more than 200 kilometres of tunnels beneath the city.
For all that, one of Mount Isa's most interesting tunnels is also its smallest. Chipped into a slope behind Mount Isa Base Hospital, the city's wartime underground hospital offers an easy peek below the earth. The underground wards were built in response to the bombing of Darwin in 1942. Patients were to be evacuated underground on warning of an aerial attack on Mount Isa.
Falling into disrepair after the war, the underground hospital was restored from 1997 using volunteer workers from the mines. What took only 16 weeks to build took four years to resurrect, and the hospital opened as a museum in 2001. Stepping into the hospital feels like entering a mine, except that the tunnels are lined with beds and other original or near-original surgical equipment. One ward remains unrestored, its ceiling a collapsed mess of wood and rock, as a comparison.
However, the larger underground story in Mount Isa is about mining. Once it was possible to tour a working mine, but visitors now descend into a re-creation of a mine beneath the city's tourism centrepiece, Outback at Isa.
A combined city history museum, art gallery, outback botanic garden and interpretive centre for the nearby Riversleigh fossil fields, Outback at Isa is also perched atop the Hard Times Mine. Built a decade ago for tourism purposes, this mine experience feels anything but manufactured; this may be one of the loudest, most boisterous tours in Australia. Fitted into gumboots, helmets and paper overalls, we descend 20 metres into the earth, where we'll spend 90 minutes wandering Hard Times' 1200 metres of tunnels.
Our guide is a former miner, Ian Brown. Working underground since 1957, he has a laconic, bearishly gruff style that makes him a natural-born guide.
It's a tour that turns mining into a spectator sport. Though Hard Times - named after John Campbell Miles' horse - is not a working mine, it is filled with working equipment. There are jackhammers we can drill into a rock face, and our guide fires up mining trucks and mucking loaders that pulsate through the tunnels. A recorded blast, of the sort that still rocks Mount Isa twice a day, explodes through the darkness. They're hellish sounds from the underworld that are simply the everyday sounds of working life to Mount Isa's miners.
"When I started, I worked with about 50 blokes," Brown says.
"There are four of us left and I'm the only one who can still hear. The motto of the story is, marry a nurse, like I did."
Back at ground level, Mount Isa retains a curious charm. Set among beautiful red outback hills, the city is strung along a bank of the Leichhardt River with the mines arrayed along the opposite side. Smoke stacks rise up to 270 metres above the city, dominating every view. Each August, Mount Isa hosts the largest rodeo in the southern hemisphere, a feat reflected along one of its main streets, Rodeo Drive. Here, plaques embedded in the footpath honour the great of the rodeo world, from legendary horses such as Rotary and Spinifex to celebrated cowboys such as Vic Gough and John Brearley.
The hills on Mount Isa's outskirts are a hint of what lies beyond.
The city is the gateway to the remote Boodjamulla (Lawn Hill) National Park, midway between the Isa and the Gulf of Carpentaria coast. Lawn Hill Gorge is the park's star feature, but not before the road passes the Riversleigh fossil fields.
Australia's richest mammal fossil deposit, Riversleigh's limestone ridges have yielded more than 60,000 fossil specimens from about 300 species of animals.
Sir David Attenborough described the World Heritage site as a "treasure house of palaeontology".
It's said that almost half of what's known about the evolution of Australian mammals was gleaned from Riversleigh.
Back in Mount Isa, climb the steps to City Lookout for a very different sunset view. Crowning a hill by the city centre's edge, the lookout "peers" across the mines. As last light rises up the smoke stacks, it's like watching the candles on a cake being extinguished. In the approaching darkness, six lines of lights flicker across the tallest of the stacks.
Each line represents the height of one deck of the mines below: six lines, six decks.
Consider that the deepest mine goes to 32 decks - more than five times the height of the stack - and it's clear again that, above the ground, I'm seeing just a tiny part of the Isa.
The writer travelled as a guest of Tourism and Events Queensland.
GETTING THERE
Qantas flies daily to Mount Isa from Brisbane while Virgin Australia flies on weekdays. See qantas.com; virginaustralia.com. Major car rental agencies available at the airport.
STAYING THERE
Mount Isa has a range of motel-style accommodation. The Outback Burke and Wills Motel is central and comfortable. See burkeandwillsmtisa.com.au.
Adels Grove offers camping as well as furnished tents and basic donga-style rooms. See adelsgrove.com.au.
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