The Mount Morgan mine

The gold mine that paid for BP and a medical institute

A mountain of gold, copper and silver in central Queensland, worked from 1882 to 1981, and for a time the largest gold mine in the world. Over the century it gave up about 262 tonnes of gold, 37 tonnes of silver and 387,000 tonnes of copper. The money went a long way from Queensland: profits from Mount Morgan funded oil exploration in Persia, which became the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and then BP, and a bequest from the mine in 1912 founded the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research. The works were a small industrial town in themselves with assay laboratories, brickworks, a foundry and a power house, and clay for the brickworks was dug from caverns under the site. The open cut is now a lake, and the town below it runs tours.