Wayne Tapp may now be officially retired but the former Ergon worker doesn’t appear to know what the word means.
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Mr Tapp remains extremely active as a volunteer in the Cloncurry community and is vice president in the local historical society.
It was his hard work for the community that saw him deservedly take out Cloncurry’s Citizen of the Year at this year Australia Day awards.
Last year Cloncurry celebrated its 150th birthday and Mr Tapp was one of the reasons why the week-long event was such a success.
“I did a lot of legwork behind the scenes and I think that pushed me over the line towards (the award),” Mr Tapp said.
Mr Tapp is also one of the organisers of Cloncurry’s Rockana Gem and Mineral Festival in June.
“I’m involved in the set up, running and pull down of the show, I just like to make sure it runs well,” he said.
Mr Tapp’s love of rocks and local history is matched only by his love of talking to people.
“They mentioned at the speech they gave at the awards, I’m always on a barbecue somewhere,” he said.
“For instance I was on a parade float at C150 and as soon as we went across the finish line – I had a white short, black tie and black pants on – and parked the float I whipped around to the toilets and changed out of the suit into a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and turned on the barbecue for the state school.”
The state school used to have a lot of barbecues for the rodeo so “Wayne would be there”.
Mr Tapp said he loved interaction with people.
“People will come up and ask me will I cook a bit of steak, and I remember one person asked me so I put one piece on the plate, she said turn it, so I turned it, and she said, that’ll do,” he said.
“I did the same with the next piece and cut it open to see what it was like, and it was red meat, and I thought that’s not for me, but that woman, she said it was great and came back and congratulated me on how I cooked it.”
Mr Tapp said his work at the Historical Society had him involved with Kuridala.
“When I first came here back in 1976, the people I met in Mount Isa said come and have a look at Kuridala,” he said.
“I went there and all they showed me was the smelters and the slag heap and over time we used to go out there and every time we’d find something different.”
Mr Tapp said he and his wife went out there in March 2013 and found that all the roads had changed from the original settlement. “I eventually found the main street and I was looking for stuff I remembered from the first trip, and I found a date on a tank, 28 December 1913, so I came back in December to retake the picture, a hundred years apart,” he said. “Since then I spend five or six hours a night on Trove to find out information on the place and the more I looked the more I found and the more I found the more I wanted.”
Mr Tapp has used Google Earth to work out where structures were at Kuridala such as a dam wall no one knew exactly where it was.
“Kuridala was the centre of the world at the time but once the price of copper fell at the end of the First World War they shut the smelters, hoping that the price would rise but it didn’t and there was a mass exodus on the train of all the miners.”
Mr Tapp said the same thing happened at Mt Cuthbert and Selwyn (Mt Elliot) and he hopes history does not repeat itself almost a century later. “I don’t want to predict doom and gloom but what happened to Kuridala is something that worries me about Mount Isa,” he said.