It began as a deep distant rumbling, like the stirring of some gargantuan subterranean beast.
It was unsettling at first, ominous, something you felt in your guts more than you heard with your ears, an eerie subsonic vibration that seemed to rise from the bowels of Hades.
As the she-devil crept closer, the wailing began.
It all started in November 1883. Payable gold was found on a high ridge separating the magical Linda Valley from the Queen River valley, some 18 kilometres inland from the isolated west coast Tasmanian town of Strahan. This discovery led to mining leases that supported rich copper mines. These mines eventually merged in 1903 to form Mount Lyell’s, and indeed the world’s, largest copper mining operations.
