Qualla: Paraburdoo Mine https://qualla.com/paraburdoo-mine en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:26 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/q/e/g/e/paraburdoo-mine-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Paraburdoo Mine https://qualla.com/paraburdoo-mine Paraburdoo Mine: Introduction https://qualla.com/paraburdoo-mine/ Photo credit Calistemon, CC BY-SA 3.0. The name is a gift from the people who lived here first. Paraburdoo comes from a local Aboriginal word for 'feathered meat' - a reference to the corellas and flock pigeons that wheel over this corner of the Pilbara in noisy white clouds. It is a soft, almost gentle name for a place defined by something hard: iron. Beneath the red dust and spinifex lies one of the richest concentrations of ore on the planet, and the open pit that carries the birds' name has spent half a century being carved, blasted, and hauled away one trainload at a time.

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Image: Calistemon | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/q/e/g/e/paraburdoo-mine-wp/qege-paraburdoo-mine-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Paraburdoo Mine: Eighty Percent of a Nation's Iron https://qualla.com/paraburdoo-mine/ Photo credit Calistemon, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Hamersley Range is not just an iron province; it is the iron province. The ranges holding the Paraburdoo mine contain roughly 80 percent of all identified iron ore reserves in Australia, making this one of the great mineral storehouses of the world. The numbers from the mines...

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Image: Calistemon | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/q/e/g/e/paraburdoo-mine-wp/qege-paraburdoo-mine-eighty-percent-of-a-nations-iron.mp3 0:06 2 full Paraburdoo Mine: A Town Built to Dig https://qualla.com/paraburdoo-mine/ Photo credit Calistemon, CC BY-SA 3.0. Paraburdoo exists because the ore does. When Hamersley Iron - a subsidiary of Rio Tinto - opened the mine in 1972, it gazetted a town the same year to house the people who would work it. Unlike the fly-in camps that dot much of the modern Pilbara, Paraburdoo's workforce actually ...

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Image: Calistemon | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/q/e/g/e/paraburdoo-mine-wp/qege-paraburdoo-mine-a-town-built-to-dig.mp3 0:06 3 full Paraburdoo Mine: The Long Iron Road https://qualla.com/paraburdoo-mine/ Photo credit Calistemon, CC BY-SA 3.0. Mining the ore is only half the story. Getting it to a ship is the other. Crushed and screened on site into lump and fines - the lumps capped at 31.5 millimetres, the fines at 6.3 - the ore is loaded onto trains and sent down the Hamersley and Robe River railway toward the port o...

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Image: Calistemon | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/q/e/g/e/paraburdoo-mine-wp/qege-paraburdoo-mine-the-long-iron-road.mp3 0:06 4 full Paraburdoo Mine: The Cost of the Boom https://qualla.com/paraburdoo-mine/ Photo credit Calistemon, CC BY-SA 3.0. It is tempting to read the Pilbara purely as a triumph of engineering and scale, and on one level it is. But the same iron that built the boom has carried a heavier cost, paid mostly by the Aboriginal peoples whose country this is. Less than a hundred kilometres north of Paraburd...

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Image: Calistemon | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/q/e/g/e/paraburdoo-mine-wp/qege-paraburdoo-mine-the-cost-of-the-boom.mp3 0:06 5 full