Few first sights have ever had such an impact on us and for all the wrong reasons.

What have they done?

Queenstown is unquestionably a mining town and arriving as we did from Strahan via the northwest, you are hit with a monstrous, unworldly view of the mountains ripped apart and stripped of anything recognisable as natural. It’s an environment destroyed by past generations.

First explored in 1862 but not until years later alluvial gold was discovered at Mount Lyell. Leading to the formation of the Mount Lyell Gold Mining Company in 1881**. The following year enormous reserves of copper was discovered, which turned out to be the largest in the world. There was one big problem however, it was relatively easy to extract the ore from the mine but no form of transport to get it to the port of Strahan.

Bowes Kelly of the Lyell company contracted surveyors to find if it was possible to lay tracks for a train to the port at Strahan. Through dense forest and over brutal mountains the team proposed a possible route but with one big caveat – the line would have to climb over a steep mountain and down the other side, steeper than anything ever constructed in Australia.

Bowes Kelly, now head of operations for the company had a saying ‘Find a way or make it’ and that is precisely what they did. Contracting a locomotive builder in Glasgow, the company ordered a locomotive engine of a new design following a visit to Switzerland. The Swiss engineer and clockmaker Dr Roman Abt, had designed a rack and pinion system using a pinion (cog) driven by two steam pistons beneath the engine. Two traditional pistons powered the train until reaching the rack, placed in the middle of the track, where the locomotive driver would engage the pinion for the steep climb up and down the mountain. With the Abt system the train was able to climb and descend at a gradient of 1:15, more than twice as steep as any standard rail locomotive and the steepest gradient of any rail track south of the equator. As a comparison a typical inclination for an Australian rail track is 1:3000.

Unfortunately the first engine delivery didn’t go quite to plan. Abt train no.1 arrived in Tasmania in a crate as a kit, without any instructions and no one had ever built a train in Tasmania from parts. Eventually they managed to figure it out and put the train into service hauling ore from Queenstown to the port in Strahan. Whether it was the method in which it had arrived or the lack of experience, it wasn’t the most reliable of engines. Abt no.1 was eventually replaced with additional engines arriving pre-assembled and proving far more robust.

Abt trains revolutionised transport in areas of steep terrain in many countries and, in particular, and helped turn the west coast of Tasmania into one of the wealthiest mining regions in the world.

The heritage West Coast Wilderness Railway continues to operate several Abt trains from Queenstown for paying passengers. The daily service normally runs through to Strahan via the 1:20 climb to Rinadeena and the 1:15 decent to Dubbil Barril. However, due to a recent landslide the train is currently only running to Dubbil Barril, the halfway point before returning to Queenstown. It is an excellent half-day experience passing through dense rainforest and alongside precipitous gorges with stunning views down to the river below. A running commentary tells the history of the line and the stories of those who built it. It was backbreaking labour using just picks and shovels in a permanently wet, leech and mosquito infested rainforest.

Cast from Steel

About two-thirds of the way up the Gormanston Hill, known questionably as ‘99-Bends’, is sited a large steel panel with a cut out of the town’s name ‘Queenstown’. It’s a good vantage point with views over the Queenstown basin, the mountain bike trails on Mount Owen and the mountains beyond. If arriving by the west you are greeted by heavily forested mountains, nature at its best, as it has been for millennia and as it should be. Even the thin wisps of smoke rising vertically from log fires burning from tin-roofed shacks and houses looks picturesque. What a damning contrast, though, if arriving from the northwest. It shows just what an untouched area this once was before the discovery of gold and later, copper.

Environmental Disaster

As if extracting the ore was bad enough for the landscape worse was to come. Copper smelters burning millions of tonnes of timber from the surrounding hills and mountains created toxic sulphur fumes. The sulphur in the air reacted with rain forming acid-rain, which killed the remaining trees that hadn’t already been felled to stoke the smelters. With the trees gone there was nothing to hold the soil stable over the underlying rock allowing the rain to gradually wash the soil into the Queen River along with iron oxides leaching from the newly exposed rock. The barren hills we see today along the twisting Gormanston Hill road is a partially recovered landscape but it is unlikely to ever support the rare, giant Billy Pine trees that once grew here.

Rusting River

But that wasn’t the end of the damage. Just as visible is the bright rust colour of the Queen river that flows through the valley. Years of unwanted tailings from the mine were allowed to flow into the river creating further problems downstream. Oxides, in particular iron oxide from the exposed hills along the river and chemicals from the copper extraction process, are leaching out of the creeks and streams into the river creating the rusty water we see today. It has been suggested since mining was ceased that recovery of the river could happen within decades – others believe many hundreds of years is more likely.

Iron Blow

At the very top of the steep and winding Gormanston Hill sits an enormous hole in the earth known as Iron Blow. It is the result of the discovery of gold in the Linda Valley in 1883. The gold was difficult and expensive to mine but then copper was discovered, masses of it which continued to be extracted for nearly 30-years before the site was closed following the discovery of even richer deposits on the other side of the mountain.

A cantilevered viewing platform has been constructed over the edge to give the frights to anyone with a fear of heights. The open cut mine is much deeper than we can currently see as water continues to fill the lower reaches. It is well worth stopping to peer into the bowels of the earth to get an idea of how big open cut mines can be. And this, in Australian terms, is by no means a big one.

** In the 100-years that the mine operated 120,000,000-tonnes of ore were extracted. In 2022 plans were put in place to reopen the mine.