Advertisement
Published: August 5th 2014
Edit Blog Post
Mt Morgan Open Cut Gold Mine
The colour is caused by the sulphuric acid in the water from pyrites rocks. You can just see the 3 jets of water trying to evaporate some of the water to keep the level low enough to prevent it mixing with the town's water supply. Our Mount Morgan Tour was due to start at 10.30am at the Tourist Information Centre of the town so we were up and out quite quickly this morning. We arrived at the lovely mint green coloured Historic Railway Station Museum, which also housed the Info Centre, with about 10 minutes to spare – just enough time to take a few photos and have a look at some brochures. The tour minibus turned up soon after and the ten of us doing the trip piled in.
Our guide took us around Mount Morgan and showed us some of the older buildings, including an old cinema with a colourful mural showing some movie stars in their movie roles (e.g. Marilyn Munro with her white dress blowing up; Clint Eastwood in the “Go ahead – make my day” movie). Unfortunately it is only used occasionally now. We also saw the Irish Quarter, where the Irish miners had settled together. He pointed out that all the streets’ names were “ __ Lane”, evidently a usual thing over there. He also pointed out some trees growing in the streets where gardens had been many years ago, including mangos, figs, macadamias and a special Mt Morgan
Wattle with a darker golden flower only found in the area.
We were told that the Gold Mine had originally been underground, 130 years ago, and had boasted that it was the richest one in the world at the time. Eventually they started using open-cut mining as it was much quicker and safer. All told, over the 100 years it was operating, the mine produced 225 tonnes of gold, 50 tonnes of silver and 360,000 tonnes of copper. Some of the old mining methods weren’t very good for the environment, though, and he showed us a very milky green looking river that had been contaminated with arsenic, used in processing gold. He said this was much cleaner than it had been five years ago and it looked terrible now! The water from this river had to be kept separate from the town’s water supply.
The mine became unviable once the richest veins were finished and closed. Since then, several companies have done feasibility studies into the chance of success with more modern machinery and decided it was still no good. There is another going on now. One of the expenses that needs to be taken into account is
the new laws requiring the pits and surrounding land to be restored to their former pristine condition – very expensive but necessary for the environment.
In its heyday the town had 57 pubs, many in the Irish Quarter, but there are now only about 20.
We were taken up to see the old sawmill, where the mine and tramway timbers were cut, and the coal-fired power station that used to operate there, plus a lot of the equipment they used to use, including diggers, tanks and furnaces. There was also Australia’s tallest free standing chimney dominating the skyline, despite showing evidence of several lightning strikes, which had removed the capping stones and left scars on it (they now have lightning rods all over the top of it so it doesn’t happen anymore).It was made from 33,000 bricks and was originally part of a large furnace.
Next we went into the Mine Offices, which are still used to manage the environment and safety of the mine, though long ago closed. The building also houses a mining museum with, among other things, samples of the various ores that come from the area, including gold, copper and silver. The gold
An NCR Accounting Terminal
I used to use one of these when I worked at the National Westminster Bank in 1971. This one was in the Mt Morgan Mine offices. wasn’t found for a long time because it is not found as nuggets or dust, readily seen gleaming. It is embedded in a very heavy blackish volcanic rock and doesn’t show. It wasn’t until someone questioned the weight of these rocks that it was discovered and mined. The whole area was made up if that gold-bearing rock.
The mining museum had a good fossil display done by the same person who had created the one at Peak Hill, NSW, mainly using replicas but with a few real fossils. The highlights were a cast of part of a small Freshwater Plesiosaurus that had been found at the mine and a cast one of the 300 Theropod (raptor) footprints that had been found on the roof of a cave nearby as positives (sticking out not depressions). People used to be taken to see them but, unfortunately, the cave has become too dangerous so we couldn’t see them.
One other thing I did see, in the old office that showed equipment used there in the past, was an NCR Accounting Machine Terminal exactly like the one I had used when I was working at the National Westminster Bank in 1971. It
The Original Underground Mine at Mt Morgan
You can see the winch used to lower the trucks down the face near the top. They drove back up once they were full of ore. brought back mixed memories as the bank had gone onto the new computer system, using those terminals, throughout the whole country just before England’s monetary system went metric. It was done so the job of changing all the accounts in all the branches would be done automatically by the computer. That part worked well. The problem was that they had overloaded the central computer in London, to which we were all linked by telephone lines, and it was constantly crashing. Customers would come in and ask what their account balance was and would, naturally, get quite irate when we couldn’t tell them. Head office finally solved the problem by sending a printout of all the balances overnight each day so that we could look them up when requested.
The final part of our tour was the Open Cut Pit itself. It looked similar to the Peak Hill one in NSW but much larger. It was colourful around the sides and was full of a huge lake of sulphuric acid. We were told the acid forms from the minerals in the grey rock around the mine which is full of pyrites. When it was in use they used to lower
The Tallest Free Standing Chimney in Oz
It was originally part of the generating furnace at Mt Morgan and is made of 33,000 bricks. the ore trucks by winch down the side of the mine wall, fill them and then they would drive up the steep, twisty road back to the top.
We could see three huge jets of water which were drawn from the acidic lake and sprayed a fine mist into the air. This is done to try and keep the water level from getting too high and spilling into the river, which was used for drinking water by the town. The water evaporated and we were told the sulphur would just drop to the ground, which meant the process was not reducing the contamination of the lake at all, just maintaining the level. If the wind changed so it was blowing across the town, they would turn off the jets as they didn’t want to spray the town with acid.
There were lots of colourful rocks across the lookout area, including the grey pyrite rocks. We were allowed to collect any we wanted so I found a very tiny piece of rock with crystals of pyrite shining in it (we have to watch our van’s weight so no big ones!).
That was the end of the tour so
The Tropic of Capricorn Spire
This spire marks the line of the Tropic of Capricorn in Rockhampton our guide took us back to the Information Centre at the station and dropped us off. I went to use the Ladies and was very surprised to see a piano and a lace covered table with a vase of silk flowers on it in a small waiting room next to the toilet, which had another lace covered table in it!
We then had a drink and a snack under a tree in front of the station before heading back to Rocky, where we went to the Kershaw Botanic Gardens for a walk and to find a place to eat our late lunch. There were some nice trees, including a few types of palm and an enormous bottle tree. They also had a section of the garden set up as a memorial to the armed forces, featuring some cannon and a circular bed with hedges trimmed to show the words Army, Navy, RAAF, and ANZACs.
We found a pleasant spot at one end near an old railway station and sat at a table while I made the sandwiches. We were immediately joined by a Currawong and a pair of Kookaburras looking for handouts, which we provided sparingly.
Next we went to the Tropic of Capricorn Tourism Centre, where they have a spire marking the Tropic’s position, so of course we took our photos next to it. The sign for the Centre had a large blue bull on top. Just one more of the Rockhampton bulls we keep seeing everywhere. The town has made a feature of statues of six different breeds of bull that are farmed in the region for beef, one of the major industries here. As we drove back to the van I made a point of looking for some of them.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.079s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 6; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0454s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb