Qualla: Radium Hill

Radium Hill: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Some of the radium that came out of this dry South Australian hillside ended up in the laboratories of Marie Curie and Ernest Rutherford. That is a startling thing to know while standing in front of what little remains: a water tank, a swimming pool gone to dust, the ghosts of street lines and garden beds in the saltbush east of Olary. Radium Hill was Australia's first uranium mine, opened in 1906, decades before the country's nuclear age properly began. For a while it supplied the rarest, most expensive substance on Earth to the scientists inventing modern physics. Then it supplied yellowcake to the atomic age. And then, like so many mining towns, it simply emptied out and was demolished, leaving the desert to reclaim it.

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Radium Hill: The Geologist and the Glow

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It began with a prospector named Arthur John Smith, who in 1906 noticed something strange in the rock roughly 40 kilometres east-southeast of Olary. His samples travelled to the University of Adelaide, where a young geologist examined them and found radium and uranium. That geolo...

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Radium Hill: Worth More Than Gold

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

To understand the frenzy, consider the price. By 1911, radium had reached £13,000 per gram - a sum that makes gold look like loose change. That same year the company spent £15,000 building a refinery at Hunters Hill in Sydney to extract radium compounds from the ore. The radium b...

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Radium Hill: The Atomic Years

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Radium Hill's largest chapter came after the Second World War, when the world wanted uranium not for medicine but for weapons and reactors. Between 1954 and 1961 the mine drove a main shaft 420 metres deep, crowned by a 40-metre headframe, and hauled up nearly a million tonnes of...

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Radium Hill: What the Miners Carried

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The hardest part of Radium Hill's story is written not in the ruins but in the people who worked there. In 1979, a New South Wales government study found that cancer-related deaths among former Radium Hill workers ran at four times the national average. Among underground miners w...

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