The final day.   Although the tour officially ended on the evening of Tuesday 3 March, those travelling beyond Brisbane and Northwest Queensland did not fly out until Noon on Wednesday 4th.   Consequently, to make use of the extra time, an impromptu half day visit was arranged to the exhausted Mary Kathleen mine 60 km east of Mount Isa for those remaining.   Mary Kathleen, which produced 12 425 t of U3O8, is hosted by lenses of 'garnetite' in a faulted synformal core of regionally metasomatised micaceous schist, quartzite, scapolite-diopside metasomatites and marbles of the Mesoproterozoic Corella Formation.   The group travelled to and from Mary Kathleen (returning 'just in time' to connect with their flight out of Mt Isa) in the tour van (right). This was one of the four such twelve passenger vans hired or chartered in Adelaide, Olympic Dam, Darwin and Mount Isa for surface transport, either self driven for local and after hours usage, or chauffeur driven for longer trips.
Photographs by Mike Porter.