A mining town reframes: Raymond Arnold and the LARQ Project
In the remote west of Tasmania in 1883, prospectors came across a strange rocky outcrop jutting twenty or thirty feet above the surface, the result of an ancient catastrophic event. By 1929, this geological feature known as Mt Lyell Iron Blow had been transformed into a huge hole, an open cut mine that, at its peak, produced around a million tonnes of ore a year, the highest of any mine in Australia at the time. Copper smelting wreaked havoc on the surrounding landscape: eleven furnaces required over 2,000 tonnes of timber each week; the furnaces emitted toxic sulphur fumes; heavy rainfall on the denuded hillsides eroded the top soil; and an estimated 100 million tonnes of tailings were washed into the Queen River contaminating waterways and killing all aquatic life.
