CROSSES, TUNNELS, SPRINGS AND THINGS

The whole trip can be made in a day, with lunch at Fountain Springs or shorter trips can be taken to the Maltese Crosses or Rosebud Dam and the old mine there.

The track past Mt. Frosty to the crosses is rough - a four-wheel drive is recommended. From Wee Macgregor, the road over the range is very rough and meets the Fountain Spring's road a couple of kilometres north of Ballara. The section through the tunnel is extremely rough. The track to Fountain Springs, via Rosebud, is quite good and it would take an hour from Old Mary Kathleen to the Springs.

The following notes describe points of interest en route in an anti-clockwise direction.

The Wee Macgregor turn off is 6.8km from Mary K turnoff and is marked by a sign saying Mount Frosty on the Mount Isa side of Mary K.

Mt. Frosty lies about 1km off the main track. It is an old limestone pit worked in the sixties to supply flux to MIM. Near the bottom of the hole there are large slugs of bronze coloured charcopyrite (copper iron sulphide) embedded in the white calcite. It is a favourite swimming hole in the summer.

At about 9km from the bitumen, a narrow valley can be seen in the hills about 1km off to the right-hand side, just as the track makes a definite bend to the south. This is the outer end of a small gorge that can be reached either by walking from the track or by going bush in a 4WD at about 3.2km from the bitumen and keeping to the base of the hills. You may pickup a bit of an old track along here that leads to an old campsite at the southern end of the gorge.

At 1km from the bitumen, the small Melba copper mine is passed and 2.5km further on, a prominent quartz vein forms a white wall on the left-hand side, and Cattle Creek is crossed in another 1.5km.

The Maltese Crosses are reached 1.6km after Cattle Creek, although you will find that most of the gravel you are driving over consists of Crosses. The main hunting ground occurs along the next 600m of track, and generally to the left of it. At the end of this section is a small gully containing tiny pink garnets, which occur as sand in the hollows of the creek.

A Maltese Cross is actually a twin crystal of Staurolite (iron aluminum silicate). There are many single Staurolite crystals, which are recognisable by their dark brown colour, prism shape and roughly diamond shaped cross-section. A twin occurs because the atomic structure of the Staurolite is such that it allows crystal growth in several other directions almost as easily as in the correct (single crystal direction).

The most sought after crosses are those having two equal sized arms at right angles to each other. They are not all that common, but you should find one or two in half an hour or so. Another interesting find for rockhounds is a piece of mica schist containing the Staurolites and garnets in situ. There is plenty of this in the area. Just before the Wee Macgregor Mine is reached, a track pointing to the left is to Ballara via the tunnel. This track is definitely 4WD.

Wee Macgregor was one of the copper mines worked in the early part of this century. Hampden-Cloncurry Copper Mines Limited bought it in 1912, but it produced very little ore for them. Gougers then worked the mine intermittently until about 1975 when Eastern Copper Mines N.L commenced a leaching operation using acid bought from Mary Kathleen Uranium.

The most interesting aspect of this area is the old railway formation. In 1915, the Hampden-Cloncurry Company built the line, which diverged from the main line at Devoncourt, to haul ore from Wee Macgregor and a group of other nearby mine to the smelters at Kuridala. Apart from the tunnel, the other notable feature of the line is the rock dry pitching which covers the embankments along the formation.

Past the tunnel is the old townsite of Hightville marked by a flow cement slabs, bits of iron and broken bottles. At 1.3km from Hightville, the track diverges left to the main Fountain Springs road while the right-hand one continues down the railway formation to Ballara. 200 metres along this track can be seen the marked grave of Thomas Tame, 37 years of age, killed in an accident at the Macgregor Mine. After firing a sink hole with blasting powder at midday, and after lunch about 45 minutes later, he descended the shaft and was overcome by fumes and gasses. He was retrieved about 3.5 hours later but he was dead. The accident happened on February 15th, 1912. He came from Berkshire, England, and had been in Queensland about four years.

At Ballara, the remains of station platforms crumble in the weather. The flat ground on the south side of the line once supported a thriving community of miners, merchants, and railway men.

The Fountain Range overshadows the track southward to Fountain Springs on the right. This ridge is formed by a series of quartz veins that have invaded a long northeasterly trending fault. The quartz, being more resistant than the surrounding rock, has eroded more slowly and now stands up strongly. The water at fountain Springs is permanent.

Looking southeast from the spring's turnoff, you will see the black turreted peaks of Mt. Philp. This is a narrow sinuous body of iron ore (mainly Hematite - an oxide of iron), of significant size compared with those being mined elsewhere.

Returning north, the Lady Jenny copper-silver mine is passed 3.5km north of Ballara. A further 9.5km on is Rosebud Dam, built to supply water to the small town of Rosebud and its mine during the pre-twenties boom. The mine that was owned by the Corella Copper Company also supported a small smelter, which closed in 1917. All that remains today is a large slagheap, the concrete foundations and shaft.

A good many purple bottles and other paraphernalia have been found around the old townsite which occupied both banks of the Corella River. One not often visited is the southern bank, immediately south east of the sharp bend in the track after it crosses the river. A pit containing bottles exists on the edge of the next gully to the east.

From the Creek crossing back to the highway is 6.3km where a driver reviver rest stop is now situated, and another 3.5km to the left brings you back to the Mary K turnoff.

Roc Doc

Download a PDF mudmap (436kb) of the Maltese Cross area.

Courtesy of Greg Humphrey and the Mount Isa Family History Society.

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