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flies, thirst and isolation. But here Henry built a home for himself and his wife, the first dwelling in
the area. Hudson Fysh described it years later as 'a small shack at the mine, with bloodwood
uprights and saplings stretched across for wall plates, the sides sheathed with bark, a thatched
cane-grass roof completing the structure.'
When Henry found two other sources of copper further north near the Leichhardt River, which
became the Crusader and Dobbyn mines, he set off by sea to Sydney and thence to England,
where he hoped to drum up some finance for his mining ventures and acquire some skilled
copper miners to work in them. The miners he found, 30 from Cornwall, but he failed to win
any financial support. In the meantime, Sheaffe and three miners dug out a dray-load of copper
from the Great Australia and sent it by bullock-train to Normanton, a recent settlement near the
Gulf posing as a river-port. From there the copper was shipped across the world to some
smelters in Wales, affording Henry and Sheaffe an eventual profit of £21.
Progress was very slow on every front. The discovery of gold in the Selwyn Range south of
Cloncurry drew other miners to the area, and by 1870 there were about 100 Europeans and 40
Chinamen scattered about the baking bush and torrid hills. The Great Australia's output was still
quite small - 22 tons of ruby oxide ore and native copper in 1872 - and it was not until 1876
that the collection of huts and tents that dotted the red earth near the mine were officially tidied
up and laid out as a township called Cloncurry. The first general store and the first hotel, the
Royal, had been opened four years earlier, the former by Ernest Henry.
There was never a rush of prospectors to 'The Curry', as the settlement became known. But
shallow scrapes of alluvial workings scarred the landscape here and there: Soldier's Cap, 30
miles east; and Gilded Rose, 10 miles southwest, which would one day be uselessly owned by
Sugar Honeycombe.
Although Ernest Henry discovered two more copper mines, at Argylla (1880) and Mount
Oxide (1882), while others discovered copper at Hampden, near Kuridala, at Duchess and Mt
Elliot, the problems arising from climate, transport costs, terrain and distance proved all but
insurmountable, and the whole area soon declined. The output of both gold and copper was
small, and the cost of every means of transport, whether by bullock, horse or camel, was
prohibitive. Cloncurry was in the proverbial middle of nowhere and the heat was also extreme.
In fact, Australia's highest ever temperature was recorded at Cloncurry in January 1889, when it
soared to 127.5 degrees Fahrenheit (53.1°C) - in the shade. The Great Australia, which Henry
sold to some Scottish investors in 1884, packed up production - although smelting was now
being done on the site - three years later, just as the alluvial gold-fields in the district petered
out. Ernest Henry retired with his wealth to Sydney, dying there, aged 84, in 1920.
1884 was also notable for the arrival of the first Cobb & Co coach in Cloncurry, where some
500 people now lived, sheltering from the sun and slaking their thirsts at one or more of the six
crude structures that called themselves hotels; soon there were eleven. Before Cobb & Co, mail
had been
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something to turn up." Starvation... is by no means very unpleasant, but for the weakness one
feels, and the utter inability to move one's self.'
King, a living skeleton, was found by Alfred Howitt's expedition in mid-September. Some
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