Tennant Creek

A dusty outback town, but it does have a good range of services and interesting museums highlighting aboriginal life and their connection to the land, about mining and the 1930s goldrush and describing the hardships of early settler life in the area. The Overland Telegraph Line was built through here in 1872 to connect Adelaide with Darwin and from there with the existing line to London. Stations were needed to house linemen for repairs and operators to relay the signal before it faded.

Click on a picture for a larger version.

Bill Allen Lookout

Town in the distance, mine on the right

View south

Battery Hill Mining Museum

There is a lot of old mining equipment strewn around the site

Mining junk yard

Museum about local settler history

These tubs were used to lower two men down a mine shaft

Battery

A more modern battery than Charters Towers

Ore is dumped in this hopper, forced through where it drops into a preliminary crusher...

is carried up the conveyor...

and is crushed very fine in the battery stamper where water is added before the slurry flows onto the amalgamation table

It is pumped to the roof...

where it is mixed in a ball mill

...and passed over a secondary amalgamation table

The amalgam is smelted to release gold...

and the remainder pumped into a tailings pond

Weighbridge and old Battery office

Biking North

Ross Creek

Telegraph Station

Main building with men's quarters behind

Lineman's quarters, stables and smithy

Funky nightclub

Since the Station closed it has had many uses including storage for a cattle station...

and as a butchers shop

Old smithy

Graves of a lineman and a cattle rancher

Incredibly isolated in 1872, the area is still empty... regulations required that nothing could be built within 7 miles of the station or 100 yards of the line. So the town is 7 miles away to the south