Weipa

Carmen Friend
May 31, 2018
2 min read

Leaving Cooktown we headed for Weipa. We decided to do this trip over two days stopping at Musgrave Road House on night one and then onto Weipa. Musgrave Roadhouse was first built in 1887 named after Sir Anthony Musgrave who was the Queensland Governor. It was originally a repeater station housing banks of batteries and a generator for the telegraph line. This was $24 per night unpowered but had good showers and toilets. You can explore around the Roadhouse including seeing some freshwater crocs in the dam!

The road from Cooktown through to Weipa is a mix of sealed and unsealed. It is sealed from Cooktown through to Laura and then there are various sections of red dirt and sealed sections. The red dirt is a mix of corrugation - some has been pretty bad and some sections have been great - Musgrave to Weipa was really good! There are some steep dips and also floodways along the route which are marked with signs. Where the sections are very rough, there are signs warning of this.

There are also signs warning of cattle on the road - we had a Mexican standoff with some on the way!! Roadtrains - those with 3 trailers can be seen along this route as Weipa is a mining town. The Bauxite mine has been running since around 1963 with Mapoon being signed over to Rio Tinto and the Aboriginals being forcible moved out of their homes and relocated. Some of the Aboriginal's have since returned to the Mapoon area in 1974. There is a memorial marking the 'Old Mapoon' town and relocation of the locals. There is also a memorial marking the landing of the Dutch in 1606 to the Cullen Point area.

Driving into Weipa, you can see the ships being loaded with Bauxite and also the mined Bauxite piles waiting to be loaded onto the ships. Arriving into Weipa, you are greeted by the first set of traffic lights since leaving Cairns! These lights are seen here and also on the way out to Mapoon. There are roads specifically created for the trucks and scrapers and other mining vehicle to travel on instead of using the sealed public roads. We were lucky enough to see one scraper which was full. This mine is one of the largest in the world. The Bauxite is scraped from the top of the land only here. There is no open cast mining as the Bauxite is so high in the ground. The mine is massive producing 22.8million tones per year from mid 2019!