Mount Mulligan, Queensland

Mount Mulligan is a former mining town and rural locality in Shire of Mareeba, Queensland, Australia. It is the site of the Mount Mulligan mine disaster, Queensland's worst mining disaster.HistoryIt was a coal mining town from 1910 until 19 September 1921 when an underground explosion killed 75 miners (all the miners in the town). The mine closed, but reopened in 1923 and continued in production until 1957 when a hydro-electric scheme eliminated the need for the coal.The town's coal was mined from shafts dug into a Permian layer within the cliff face or escarpment of a large 18km x 6.5km free-standing conglomerate and sandstone massif (rising up to 400 metres above the township) known by the name given it by the small group of prospectors who first sighted it in 1874 while searching the Hodgkinson River for gold, under the leadership of James Venture Mulligan.The conglomerate and sandstone massif known to local Djungan aboriginal peoples as Ngarrabullgan was given James Mulligan's surname. The name Mount Mulligan was later given to the township that grew in the shadows of the massif's escarpment.The area of the township is no longer gazetted, but is now a ghost town, with a single cemetery, a single occupied residence, a single chimney stack, and the overgrown remains of the once busy mining operations and electricity generator. At the 2006 census, Mount Mulligan and the surrounding area had a population of 55.