Qualla: Cannington Mine

Cannington Mine: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The athletes who stood on the podium at the Sydney and Beijing Olympics were handed a piece of north-west Queensland and never knew it. The silver in many of those medals came from a place most people will never see: a hole in the ground beneath a flat, scrubby plain about 200 kilometres southeast of Mount Isa, where almost nothing marks the surface but a mine camp, an airstrip, and the shimmer of heat. Underground, Cannington is one of the largest single producers of silver and lead on Earth. From above, it is nearly invisible.

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Cannington Mine: A Fortune Underfoot

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For most of human history, Cannington's riches went unnoticed because they were buried under roughly sixty metres of younger rock, with no glint of ore at the surface to betray them. The deposit revealed itself only in 1990, when the mining company BHP flew an aeromagnetic survey...

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Cannington Mine: Silver in the Stone

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The ore here is roughly 1.6 billion years old, locked in ancient metamorphosed rocks geologists call the Soldiers Cap Group. The valuable minerals are galena, the heavy grey lead sulphide, and sphalerite, which carries the zinc. The silver hides mostly within a mineral called fre...

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Cannington Mine: A Town That Isn't There

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is no city at Cannington, only a self-contained mining settlement on a baking semi-arid plain crossed by rivers that run dry for much of the year and then flood. Hundreds of workers live on site in accommodation villages, served by a kitchen that turns out tens of thousands...

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Cannington Mine: The Cost of the Ore

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Mining at this scale carries a human cost that the production figures never show. Two workers have died at Cannington: a nineteen-year-old trainee driller in December 2006, and a fifty-one-year-old contractor in January 2008. They were young men and experienced hands doing danger...

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Cannington Mine: The Long Decline

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When the mine opened in the late 1990s, its life was expected to run about 25 years. It has already outlasted that estimate. In 2014 the mine passed from BHP to a spin-off company, South32, which still owns it. But the easy ore is gone; the deeper the workings reach, the harder a...

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