Outback Mining Towns of Australia Quiz

Answer: Most live underground

Coober Pedy was founded in 1915 when opal was discovered nearby. This town is the "Opal capital of the world". The town, 844 km or 527 miles north of Adelaide, halfway to Alice Springs, is really hot. Many of the houses (and hotels) are built underground to escape the heat.

Australia produces over 95% of all opals in the world with Ethiopia and Mexico producing other sizeable quantities. Over 80% of opals from Australia come from Coober Pedy with smaller amounts from nearby Andamooka and also at Lightning Ridge in outback NSW (Black opal, the most precious type, nearly always comes from here). There are smaller deposits near Quilpie in Queensland. All are remote outback communities.

Answer: Mount Isa, the mountain just west of the mine, is barely 1500 feet tall

Mt Isa is named after Mt Ida, a gold mine town in Western Australia. (There are no mountains around Mt Isa). Founded in 1923 specifically to mine minerals, Mt Isa is located in north west Queensland, 1900 km north west of capital Brisbane. The town is actually a city of around 22000 (2016) and is the most western city in Queensland and is the state's second biggest inland city after Toowoomba.

The mine is one of the most productive silver, lead and zinc mines in the world. The copper mine is underground but the silver/lead/zinc mine is open cut.

Mount Isa produces 10-15% of Australia's copper and lead each year.
Australia has over 27% of the world's zinc reserves where over half is in Mt Isa (and over 30% from MacArthur River in the Northern Territory).
Australia has been consistently the world's second largest producer of silver with over 55% coming from Mt Isa.

Answer: Bauxite

In 2014, Australia was the world's largest producer of bauxite (30%) and the second largest producer of alumina (19%) which is refined bauxite. Bauxite is mined in much smaller quantities in Nhulunbuy in the Northern Territory and the Darling Range in Western Australia as well as a tiny amount in Tasmania. The final stage is alumina is smelted into aluminium. Australia has six smelters; the closet one to Weipa is at Gladstone in coastal Central Queensland 1980 km to the south east

Weipa exists for Bauxite mining - they do not have to dig far to see it. Matthew Flinders saw it in the cliffs around the seashore of the town at the turn of the 18th century but he did not know what this reddish brown material was. The nearest city to Weipa is Cairns, itself in far north Queensland 850 km to the south east.

Answer: Newcastle NSW

Newcastle, New South Wales was founded in 1803 as a penal colony but also because of large coal deposits nearby in the Hunter Valley. The coal was mined by convicts and the deep water port at Newcastle meant that most of the coal was exported, Indeed NSW's first export was coal out of Newcastle. Cessnock, Singleton and Muswellbrook are the main centres in the Hunter Valley that are the coal mining towns. Newcastle has become the largest coal exporting centre in the world.

Queensland has actually more reserves than the Hunter Valley but the reserves are spread over a much broader area in Central Queensland. There are several smallish towns built around coal mines in the area such as Moura, Collinsville, Blackwater and Dysart. The port at Hay Point near Mackay is the third biggest in volume in the country. It was built purely as a coal exporting facility.
In Victoria the main coal towns are Moe and Morwell in the Latrobe Valley.

In 2016, Australia was the fourth larger producer of coal behind China, USA and India respectively but was the largest exporter of coal.

Answer: Ballarat and Bendigo

Gold was discovered in Australia before the gold rush started in 1851, but the government had quashed news of gold finds as it "believed would reduce the workforce and destabilise the economy". However when a significant proportion of Australian residents moved to the US in 1848 when California had its own gold rush, the NSW government "unquashed" this news causing a rush of immigrants to the Orange / Bathurst region of central NSW in May 1851, followed by Ballarat, Castlemaine and Bendigo in central Victoria from July to October. After the gold mining was no longer financially viable near the end of the 19th century, Bendigo and Ballarat were both thriving with secondary industries whereas Castlemaine did not have any. Consequently Ballarat and Bendigo are Victoria's third and fourth largest cities with populations around 100 000 in 2016.

Gold was found in Beaconsfield, Tasmania in 1847. Gold was found in Queensland in 1867; it saved the newly formed colony of Queensland from going bankrupt.

Australia produced three metric tons of gold in 2015. This was the second highest in the world after China.

[PS. I doubt that anybody would call anywhere in Victoria the "Outback" but most Australians, that is the 68% of them that live in capital cities, would consider Ballarat and Bendigo as being in the "Bush"]

Answer: True

Tom Price and Newman are the largest mining towns in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, a sparsely populated desert area in northern WA. Tom Price has a population under 3000 where Newman is a little bigger with 6000 people. Both towns exist to serve the nearby iron ore mines. Over 89% of Australia's iron ore production comes out of the Pilbara whereas most of the remaining 11% comes from nearby Northern Territory. Regardless all iron ore is transported to coastal Port Headland, the largest town in the region with a 2016 population of 14000; this now exists mainly as a rail head for all iron ore mined in the Pilbara and Kimberley (further north) and consequently, shipped out of the busiest port in Australia.

In 2015, Australia was the world's second largest supplier after China, supplying 25% of the world's iron ore output.

[The photo depicts banded iron formations, or BIFs, which are unusual, dense sedimentary rocks consisting of alternating layers of iron-rich oxides and iron-rich silicates. This is typical of Western Australia's Hamersley Range, and known "tiger iron". These bands are 2.47 to 2.55 billion years old]

Answer: Silver, lead and zinc

Broken Hill is a small city in the far west of New South Wales of around 19 000 (2015) people. The area was first settled in 1841 but the town was founded in 1883 when it was established to mine what was arguably "the world's richest and largest zinc-lead ore deposit". The town is actually close to Adelaide which is only 311 mi or 505 km to the west. As such, the first rail link was to Adelaide. The South Australia government paid for most of the track to the NSW border but the NSW government would not pay the last 31 miles to Broken Hill so this last section was financed privately. Broken Hill is the only part of NSW that is on Central Australian Time (same as Adelaide) and shares South Australian telephone prefixes rather than NSW prefixes.

There is an urban myth that the name refers to a hill that was mined, lowering its height. This is not true. It was named by explorer Charles Sturt. Charles Sturt saw and named the Barrier Range which had a broken hill in it to allow him to traverse same.

[The photo depicts one of several stone sculptures that can be found around Broken Hill].

Answer: False

The Argyle diamond mine is in the Kimberley region in the far northeast of WA near the Northern Territory border. Lake Argyle in the Matsu Ranges is north east of the mine. There is no Argyle River. Darwin, the NT capital, is 550 north east. Because it is 185 km (115 mi) by road from Kununurra the nearest settlement, there is a camp near the mine. Most of the 520 workers commute from Perth, a 2,000 km (1,200 mi) flight one way. Because of these distances workers alternate two-week shifts at the mine.

Argyle is the fourth-largest diamond producing mine in the world by volume, though the diamonds are not premium grade. This mine produces over 90% of the world's supply of pink and red diamonds; it also yields a large proportion of other naturally coloured diamonds, including champagne, cognac and rare blue diamonds. Australia has the third largest viable diamond deposits after Russia and Botswana.

Answer: Uranium

Roxby Downs is referred to as the most 'modern town of the outback' as it was only built in 1987 to service the new Olympic Dam mine in 1987. The town is 560 km northwest of Adelaide and is one of the driest spots in Australia with a typical desert climate: scorching hot temperatures in summer (over 40 C frequently) and it is literally freezing during winter night-times. The town's 4000 residents are nearly all connected to the mine and the population is highly transient. Andamooka, an opal town, is 31 km to the east and Woomera, a controversial name in Australian politics, is 80 km to the south.

Since it opened in 1988, Olympic Dam mine is the fourth largest copper deposit and the largest known single deposit of uranium world wide. Approximately 70% of the mine's revenue comes from copper, 25% from uranium, and the rest from silver and gold.

Australia is ranked number two in the world for copper deposits/reserves and number five in copper production. More than half comes from Olympic Dam.

Australia has the world's largest resources of uranium, 34% of world resources. This compares with other countries including Niger with 10%, Canada 9%, Kazakhstan 9%, Namibia 7% and the US 6%.

Answer: Nearly 600 km east of Perth just north of the Nullabor Plain

In 1893, gold was discovered accidentally when travellers passed through the area. This caused a gold rush forty years after it occurred in the eastern states. Infrastructure was put in place such as public transport and a fresh water pipeline from Perth. When the 21st century came there were over 30 000 people living in the city of Kalgoorlie Boulder with the open cut mine located adjacent to the town. The mine known as the "Super Pit" is approximately 3.5 kilometres long, 1.5 kilometres wide and 2.5 kilometres deep. It was Australia's largest open cut gold mine until 2016 when it was surpassed by another gold mine also in Western Australia but only 78 km from Perth.
The mining of gold, along with nickel, has been the major industry in Kalgoorlie since its inception. The single area of gold mines clustered around the original find is referred to as the Golden Mile.

Australia is ranked number one in gold reserves and number two in the world for gold production with well over three quarters of Australia's gold coming from Western Australia.