Mary Kathleen Abandoned Mining Town

What an interesting camp!

Mary Kathleen, was a uranium mining town from 1954 to 1982.

The ore was mined by the open-cut method and processed on site. The township ( where we camped) was six km away, and once had a post office, pub, cinema, sports ovals, a school, banks and a community store.

All of buildings have been removed, some were relocated to Mt Isa and are still in use today. You can still see the tennis courts, roads, round a-bouts and concrete slabs where all the temporary houses where placed.

We drove out to the open cut mine. We were able to walk around the rim of one of the sections of the mine, the colours on the wall were amazing and the kids were fascinated learning about uranium and what it was/is used for.

Then, it was back to the van for a movie marathon. Brett and I are both sick and can not shake it. We feel like utter crap. So it was a movie afternoon for all!

The next day we were feeling somewhat better ( not really), but we had promised the kids a handball challenge, so it was on! I made great use of the dunks square 😂.

You can’t camp at a mine and not go for a fossick! We checked out the pink rock mine and got ourselves some pink rock and some lovely peacock ore samples.Read more