Qualla: Cobar

Cobar: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mattinbgn (talk · contribs), CC BY 3.0. The name tells you what mattered here long before the mines. "Cobar" comes from a Ngiyampaa word - written variously as gubarr, kuparr, or cuburra - for the red and burnt earth, the ochre that Aboriginal people quarried at a waterhole and ground into body paint for ceremony. The blue and green streaks of copper were part of that palette too. So when three thirsty bore-sinkers stumbled on those same streaks in 1870 and started a copper rush, they were, without knowing it, digging at a place that had been a quarry for tens of thousands of years already. The town that grew up here took its name from the paint.

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Image: Mattinbgn (talk · contribs) | CC BY 3.0

Cobar: A Town the Ore Built

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim J Keegan from Lake Macquarie, Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0. Cobar was born in 1870 from a single outcrop of copper, and for half a century the mines were the town. At the peak of the Great Cobar copper mine, more than two thousand people worked the lodes, fed the smelters, and carted the endless firewood the furnaces devoured. Miners came...

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Image: Tim J Keegan from Lake Macquarie, Australia | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cobar: Living in the Heat

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mattinbgn (talk · contribs), CC BY 3.0. Cobar bakes. It sits in a hot semi-arid climate of long, fierce summers and short, cool winters, with rain that falls sparingly and spreads itself thinly across the year. The town logs more than 150 clear days and over 3,200 hours of sunshine annually, and the thermometer has rea...

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Image: Mattinbgn (talk · contribs) | CC BY 3.0

Cobar: The Cobar Quid

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mattinbgn (talk · contribs), CC BY 3.0. Some towns talk about shopping local. Cobar mints its own money to make the point. Since 2003 the Cobar Business Association has run a local currency called the Cobar Quid - not paper but a struck medallion, produced by the Royal Australian Mint, in denominations of five, ten, tw...

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Image: Mattinbgn (talk · contribs) | CC BY 3.0

Cobar: Still a Mining Town

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Axel Strauß, CC BY-SA 3.0. The remarkable thing about Cobar is that its mining story did not end in the history books. It is still a working mine - in fact, several. Eleven kilometres northwest, the CSA copper mine drives down nearly two kilometres, one of the deepest underground mines in Australia and amo...

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Image: Axel Strauß | CC BY-SA 3.0