Date of Adventure 19 to 24 November 2024
This is one of the strangest “ghost towns” I’ve seen. It was a mining town for a uranium mine. The mine ran until 1988 and produced a significant quantity of uranium. They had a processing facility onsite to extract the uranium from the crude ore. Producing “yellowcake”. The uranium was mostly shipped to England to their Atomic Energy Authority. At the center of the townsite is a large sign that explains everything.
I hope that you can read the text. If not, try looking it up online or put a comment below and I’ll try to add to this post. The mine is located about 6 km from the townsite.
First the townsite. There’s enough stuff here for two separate blogs so I’ll do one on the town and town square and a separate one on the mine and environs. It’s pretty weird because most mining ghost towns are just left. People seemed to walk away from the buildings when the mine petered out. But here they removed all of the buildings. It’s totally understandable why they’d remove all of the processing facility. But removing all of the dormitories and buildings is another story. They left behind all of the concrete pads that the buildings were on, sidewalks, and tarmac roads. So there’s a really large, flat area with a few walls and lots of concrete pads. The property is privately owned and is now part of a cattle station (I think). But they allow camping and exploration of the mine. Campers seem to be pretty responsible here because there’s almost no trash. In the 5 days that I stayed here maybe 10 other campers came to this part of the townsite and there’s plenty of room so they were always 300 meters or more distant. As you drive into the center of the site there are a few smaller areas that seemed to have several campers. I didn’t check them out but I can’t believe that they are flatter and easier campsites than where I camped, right at the town square.
The day I drove in it was raining a little bit so everything was wet. Kind of a nice respite from the hot and dry that I’ve been seeing.
On the road in, there’s a fork and if you go the wrong way the bridge is washed out.
So, it’s obvious that no one is maintaining the place. This is private property, part of a cattle station, but they allow camping with a few reasonable rules. There’s no water and no toilets but it’s free and really quiet and peaceful. So I stayed a long time. I wanted to spend some time writing up travels that I haven’t written about. Well, there’s a shitload of them but at least I’ll get a couple of the more recent ones down and posted here. It takes more time and effort than I’d thought when I started this.
OK When you get on the right road and into the main square for the townsite it’s clear that this was a well developed town. A lot more developed than many of the other towns I’ve been in; here in Oz and back in the States. Look at how well done the roads are. And there are lots of well spaced trees. It’s just well laid out.
OK When you get on the right road and into the main square for the townsite it’s clear that this was a well developed town. A lot more developed than many of the other towns I’ve been in; here in Oz and back in the States. Look at how well done the roads are. And there are lots of well spaced trees. It’s just well laid out.
But, as I said, the buildings have all been removed. In the general area where I camped, I think that a lot of the buildings were public buildings like the library, store, etc. But all the same, here are some pictures of the concrete pads that are left. Some of the floors were tiled and the tiles have come apart over the years.
This is still part of a cattle station and it has more grass than most places I’ve seen lately. So there were cows hanging about. In fact one day one of them got interested in my Starlink antenna so I ended up with a little cow slobber on it before I chased her away. They were totally docile. With all of the grass, I thought I’d see a lot of kangaroos. Kangaroos hang out and eat grass. I’ve seen thousands of them in the last couple of months, usually in the evening chowing down in some grassy area. But in the 5 days I was here I only saw one kangaroo in the morning one day. But there were a few other visitors. One afternoon a horse and a pony were eating there way through. They are clearly used to people because they came right up close to my campsite.
The most interesting visitors were four feral camels that were roaming through and eating on some of the trees. They weren’t too far from where I was camped but I decided to give them a bit of room. Camels can be touchy and the bulls will attack, if provoked. These guys seemed relatively docile. At least 2 of them were juveniles. Feral camels are relatively common in the center of Australia. They were used to transport good in the center of Australia before the railroads. After the railroads were finished many of their owners just released them to the wild. So now there are quite a few roaming the center of Australia. If you want an interesting story about them read “Tracks” by Robyn Davidson.
That’s the story about the Mary Katherine townsite. I’ve got a bunch of photos of the mine itself (not as much of a story) and I’ll post those in my next blog post.