Terra Tasmania: Copper spoils of Queenstown

After the Surveyor General had explored this western area with his convict work team the word was out that it was an inhospitable terrain so few but the hardy ventured across the Queen's River crossing.

One such adventurer found gold here in 1881 which caused a rush of prospectors. Several other adventurers, a few years later, discovered copper. This lead to development, which lead to wealthy investors from London operating as early venture capitalists for what quickly became known as the Mount Lyell Mining Company. A town then quickly grew up at the crossing and was gazetted as Queenstown.

Mining mushroomed the town from a tent village into a community of stylish homes, stores, public buildings and amenities. Very quickly there were pubs, picture theatre, post office and timber merchants. There were elegant manager's homes and comfortable workers' cottages. Rail and road building followed the mines and their output.

Timber forests fuelled building work. Each week, at its height, some 2000 tonnes of timber were cut down from the forests. Sulphur fumes from eleven or more furnaces belched grit and poison into the atmosphere that then sank to the ground destroying what was left of plants and trees. Acid rain from the fallout polluted the river. Mountains were hacked for their metal, until they were reduced to rubble and slag spoil.

The destruction lasted for a hundred years. Copper, silver and gold worth billions of dollars were extracted. It was thought the desecration of the area would last forever once the mine closed. And when we first saw it decades ago, I cried, so barren and lifeless it looked. As if forever scarred and dead.

But, no. Life is slowly returning to the copper coloured spoils and waters of Queenstown. There is a little green appearing among the rust, like a phoenix rising slowly, or a badly battered copper Chernobyl. I have no idea how long it will take, centuries possibly, but destruction of this magnitude we have to learn to control. I am so thankful that the Franklin and Gordon rivers have been spared this debilitation. More than once Planet Earth has shown she can only take so much man made interference before the rot sets in. Sometimes we go too far.

We spent the afternoon exploring some of the lovely retro mine boom buildings in Queenstown, some old and tired, some being remodelled. The town was the western terminus of the road from Hobart until the 1930s when a route finally wound down the mountain to Strahan. Until that time, to disperse the ore, the mines built an ingenious cog and rack rail line, to cope with extraordinary steep sections from Queenstown down to the west coast where boats then stowed the ore and shipped it around the south coast to the world markets. An amazing feat by some 400 men, working with with pick and shovel to dig out deep rock culverts and construct trestle bridges over gorges at something like 6 shillings and 6 pence a day. It is their faces that should be stamped on medals.

We found much of this local history displayed on the walls of the Galley Museum now in elegant old rooms of the Empire Hotel in town thanks to a wonderfully detailed photographic and caption collection of a local fellow, Eric Thomas. Another boon.