Newman, Marble Bar and Eighty Mile Beach

NEWMAN 17TH-18TH MAY

When you come to Newman the main attraction is the mine so the tourist thing to do is do the mine tour. Pete, Tom and Charlie went and did just that and this is what they saw and learnt.

Newman is home to the largest Single Open-Cut iron ore mine in the world it is called
Mt Whaleback. The hole in the ground stretches 5.5km long and 1.5km wide.  




 Those tiny dots in the middle are huge mining trucks!
Each "step"( they are actually called benches) in the side of the mountain is 15 meters high. The water table starts
at bench 18, counting from the top down, and they are mining on bench 28.  To keep the water level down in the pit they pump out 80 million litres of water a week and use this water through the plant for water carts and drill rigs.
They are getting ready to do some more blasting here; you need a hole 15 meters deep and 1 tonne of ANFO explosive! That is Ammonium Nitrate and 6% Diesel.  



Tom and Charlie in a bucket from a CAT992D Front End Loader.
The bucket alone weighs 12.5 Tonnes and it can handle up to 20Tonnes.



This is a water truck and it holds up to 104,000 litres of water which takes 3 hours to empty.



Charlie in side a Haul Truck Tyre from a CAT994D loader.
Width of tyre-1321mm
Diameter-3572mm
Weight of tyre alone-4754kg with rim included-6493kg
Think you might need a special jack to change the tyre!!!HA



This is showing part of the rail road system. These trains are so long they built a very large loop system so they never have to take off the engines. The line runs from Newman to Port Headland. The first trainload of iron ore left Newman in 1969 and since then over 1 Billion Tonnes of ore has been railed from Newman. An average train measures 3.75km long, has 6 locomotives, 2 at front and end and 2 in the middle, it can have between 212-336 ore cars and fully loaded can weigh around 42,000 tonnes and 1 driver is responsible for all this.





Charlie sticking his head through a drilling hole.



Tom doing the same!





This was the first excavator used at Mt Whaleback.







This is the first drill rig used at Mt Whaleback.

 

This is a 200 Tonne Wabco Ore Truck, it sits out front of the Visitors Information Centre in Newman. There was only ever 30 made of which Mt Whaleback owned 22 of. They are called 200 tonne because that is what they can carry.  In 1973 it was worth $2.5 million the visitor centre paid $1 ( that is one dollar) for it!
The mine now has 13 x 190 tonne trucks and 43 x 240 tonne trucks. These new trucks are fitted with the latest safety technology like blinking detectors! If the driver blinks too many times or not enough times the machine shuts down. All trucks are GPS tracked and can be located  within 10 meters accuracy and they can also measure how much weight is on board. They say that in a few years time they wont need drivers they will all be operated from a control room which could be back in Perth somewhere, not even on site!!!  

 The ore once dug up gets transported to a crusher which takes 1.5m size rocks and crushes them firstly down to the size of a football then takes them down to the size of a grapefruit. From here it goes to a Benefication Plant which separates the ore and waste. It is processed by both wet and dry sorting and then fed into a drum, cyclone and spiral circuit to separate out the ore from the waste using specific gravity. The waste product is called Ferro Silicon and this is reclaimed and reused.

The trucks use approximately 4000 litres of diesel every 24 hours and they have 56 trucks on the plant!


So that concludes your mining tour of Mt Whaleback!

There is a lot more to it of course but this just gives you a glimpse of the enormity of it all considering this is only one of the mines in Australia!

MARBLE BAR 

On our way to 80 Mile Beach we drove into Marble bar to have a look at this very small but again unique part of Australia. Marble Bar holds the record for the hottest place in Australia; back in the summer of 1923 -24 it had 160 consecutive days of over 38.7 degrees! No Thanks!

Marble Bar was once a thriving town of 5,000 back in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s because of the discovery of gold. They used to mine the Sulphide Gold Ore using cyanide, arsenic and nitric acid. What a deathly combination!

A stone called Jasper Bar crosses the Coongan River which is west of the town. It was this jasper bar that pioneers mistook for marble, hence the name of the town. A definite must see if ever passing this way.......



This is the first thing you see, a nice river. Then you go closer and look at the rock!




Cool! This is on the left side of the river.





 

WOW! This was on the right side of the river. It is such a mystery as to why only here? You can see in the back ground the normal red rock looking hills!
We were blown away by the colours and the way it all seemed to be confined to this area.



This is a really good example how bits of the jaspar can  be seen randomly throughout the rocks.

We were very glad we called in to have a look at this........Unfortunately we were travelling on a Sunday and everything is shut out here on the weekend so we didn't get to explore much more.

80 MILE BEACH 19^TH – 21^ST MAY

We rolled into 80 Mile Beach C.P. around 5pm. The C.P is about 10km off the main road down a corrugated road. When we were coming in we caught up to and passed a Volvo pulling a van going considerably slower than us, we thought nothing of it till we got into the office to pay and found out the Volvo driver was Ingrid and her family who is a friend I work with at Truffleduck! They are on a 4 month trip and about half way through. So that night we went over to their camp and had a great chat about each others travels. They were only stopping for the one night so it was by pure coincidence that we saw them. If they hadn't come in at the same time we would not have known they were there for we were at opposite ends of the rather large C.P.

80 Mile Beach C.P was full of grey nomads, some were passing through others have been here for weeks sitting around waiting to head to Broome or just fishing and enjoying the warmer weather. 80 Mile Beach sits half way from Port Headland and Broome with both being about 300 km away so there is not much to do except fish, walk the beach and relax.

There is a Coast Watch Station here run  by an elderly man named Bill. We had a great chat to Bill one night and he explained that they drive up and down the coast line watching out for illegal immigrants and any drug dealings that can take place out here. He has this shed on his bit of property in the C.P. and I asked him what he kept in it thinking it would be a large boat. He said he had a pool and spa in there, ha, ha we thought. So I said, seriously what do you have in the shed, he said again a pool and spa then because we didn't believe him he offered to show us. Yep, he has an above ground pool, large spa, entertainment area and a few rooms in this shed; Cool!  Bill had a huge collection of all these large shells and  said I could take what I wanted, I only took two of the smaller types but how nice to offer.


 There are signs up saying they do not recommend you go swimming here. There are sharks around but we saw the size of some of the fish people caught off the beach and I have no desire to have them nibbling at my toes; they are called white salmon or blue nose and they were about 1 meter in lentgh, a fisherman's delight to catch!
Pete had a go at fishing one day but had no luck, he was not alone, a lot of fishermen didn't catch any that day. Yet the next day was a different story when quite a few caught these large white salmon, it is pure luck on the day.


The beach is full of all different kinds of shells a real treasure trove if you like collecting. I went for a walk early one morning before the hoards of people start driving along the beach and came back with a bag full of different kinds of shells, which were posted back home.

The beach has a very large tide due to the ocean floor being so flat here.



Looking out at 80 mile beach with an average high tide. Still plenty of beach
to drive on. You can see how the fishermen are spaced out, they are
like this as far as the eye can see down the beach.

 


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Looking down 80 Mile Beach with the tide about half way out.
It looks exactly the same looking the other way. 80 miles of drivable flat beach.
You can just make out the shells scattered on the beach.

 



Pete, tom and Charlie on the beach.

 

This is walking out to the water at low tide, this felt like mud under your feet.



Low tide, we have walked out and you are looking back at the beach! 




This is as far as we walked and have only just hit the water which is ankle deep
which goes on and on.............




Looking back from our walk at low tide it is hard to see where the actual water
starts because of the mud flats shimmering in the sun.





DUSK AT LOW TIDE




SUNSET



A lovely goanna that wandered past our camp.



He was just over a meter long.

 If you want a spot just to stop, relax and recharge this is a good spot to do it. The C.P. is green and shady if you get in the middle section, which we were not but it didnt matter we still enjoyed our short stay.