Mary Kathleen
Ghost town which was once an important mining centre.
There's a real skill involved in finding Mary Kathleen these days. This famous mining town has been reduced to a bitumen road leading into the bush about 55 km from Mt Isa and 62 km from Cloncurry. The site is not marked but is on the northern side of the road. All that is left of the once thriving town is a series of old streets. Everything else, including all the houses, has disappeared as the centre was completely closed down. It is now nothing more than a memory and a Memorial Park and Museum in McIlwraith St, Cloncurry.

Burke and Wills passed through the Mary Kathleen area in 1861 and it was duly settled by pastoralists in the late 1860s. It wasn't until 1954 that uranium (then the largest known deposit in Australia) was discovered by Walton and McConachy. The latter bestowed the name of his late wife, who had died a couple of weeks earlier, upon the town.

In the next four years an eight-man syndicate was formed, a model town was built, a contract was signed with the UK Atomic Energy Authority, and the mine was brought into production.

The town had two brief lives. Between 1958 and1963 a total of 4500 tonnes of uranium were produced. A world oversupply of uranium led to the mine lying idle from 1963. It was reopened in 1974 but closed again in 1976. It was finally closed down in 1982 and the following year everything in the town from the houses to the public buildings and the equipment was put up for auction.

Things to see:  

Mary Kathleen Memorial Park and Museum in Cloncurry
The only memory of Mary Kathleen is the Memorial Park and Museum in Cloncurry which has a small number of buildings from the town and which boasts that it is 'Mary Kathleen in miniature'. A sign at the entry to the museum (which even has a recreated town square) recalls the town's former glory. It reads: 'Welcome to Mary Kathleen. This town was built by MK Uranium Ltd for the mining of the uranium deposit discovered by Walton -McConachy Prospectors syndicate to produce uranium oxide. The town mine treatment plant and Lake Corella were completed between April 1956 and May 1958 and the project is under the management of CRA Ltd.'