Tales of Tailings

Mount Isa

One child was poisoned every nine days in Mount Isa. Mount Isa was an unfolding public health tragedy which had the potential to be one of the worst industrial disasters in Australian history. Statistics showed that over 10% of the 400 kids born every year in Mt Isa had lead poisoning. Even scarier was the fact that only a quarter had been checked. 

When I questioned the impact of the acrid, sulfur filled fumes that dumped on the town when the winds blew from the west, I was told there were no problems. After I returned to work there on graduating: I mentioned it in a training class. I was carpeted. I was wrong. I was to make no reference to it. There could be no reason why the fumes were toxic: Listen, don’t question.

Lead poisoning? Why the surprise? How could you not think that the single source of environmental lead in Mt Isa was the mine? The lead that appeared on the town’s fields and contaminated the back yards of homes provided with fill from the tailings contained what? Lead.

Mount Isans rejected the danger. A child asking such questions was hushed. In the macho outback, complete with red necks and bloated stomachs, we were told we were a mining town.

Mount Isa was a great town — so great that even Queen Liz and Phil the Greek turned for a visit. Anyone that cast aspersions on the town was assumed to live in a city where people were not real Australians and avoided hard work.

How could we have believed that we lived in an era when industry was clean? But we did believe it. Has it caused me any long-term problems? Of course not. Oh, very well, I’ve had cancers, heart attacks, dengue, typhoid, hepatitis, but apart from that I am as healthy as the next person.

Judy suffered from toxic poisoning. I have already mentioned that was from the fracture cases that Dad used to make her furniture. Was that perhaps in part caused by the soil on which the Presbyterian church was built? Yet another kind donation from the benevolent mining company. Grey. Slimy. Smelly. Poisoned.

Did we see, in Mt Isa, a case of Government and corporate collaboration? Did the Government side with MIM against the interests of the community’s health? I suspect there was an element of that. Sure it all boiled over in the first decade of the twenty first century, but in those days one concentrated on being macho.

Political leaders do not listen to alarmists. Government approvals are obtained within timeframes which maintain commercial viability.

The smelter fumes? One side: mere nuisance value with occasional adverse health effects such as nausea, headache, and respiratory symptoms. Accumulation of toxins in the food chain such as dioxins and furans? Contamination in the landfill spread free by the doting company to improve your back yard? Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

In 2010 a study found that lead contamination in the soil around Mount Isa was worse than that near similar mines in China. Thank goodness that didn’t happen till 2010. It just appeared overnight.

We used to climb the hill behind the mines. We would look out over the mine. We watched trucks grinding up the grey, dusty roads to the slag heaps.

We saw winds blowing the dust off the toxic tailings and across the town. Then we would run home before the wind changed and we got caught in the cloying fumes from the smelter.

Self-preservation perhaps?.