The underground mine tour may be called Hard Times but for Outback at Isa, these are very good times indeed.
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On Monday the tour hosted ts 100,000 visitor since it opened its doors on August 1, 2003 and celebrated with an underground party.
Current Mount Isa Mayor Joyce McCulloch said the tour gave visitors the real feeling of being underground and she praised one of her predecessors, then-mayor Ron McCullough, for coming up with the idea of Hard Times and Outback at Isa.
“(He) was way ahead of his time. He knew that our community needed something other than the mines to rely on,” Cr McCulloch said.
“He understood there would come a time where you can no longer conduct tours over there (on the mine site) and that has actually happened.”
Cr McCulloch praised the team at MIETV for managing the tour and also the volunteers, many ex-miners and some still working there, who take people around on the tours.
“You do an excellent job for our community, we are proud of you,” she said.
Ron McCullough also spoke at the celebration saying it wasn’t possible without the support of Mount Isa miners who volunteered their labour because they believed in the project.
“We wanted to let the world know what the job entailed and this is a sterling example of an underground operation,” Mr McCullough said.
“We started talking about it 1996 and initially people in the mining industry said it couldn’t be done. So we went ahead and did it.”
He said it also wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Mount Isa Mines.
“Whenever we started to talk about ‘we might need this or that’, we needed to work on them for a bit,” he said. “But after a while when they saw we were demonstrating what they did, they became very supportive.”