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.
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 geologist was Douglas Mawson - not yet Sir Douglas, not yet the man who would survive one of the most harrowing solo treks in Antarctic history, but already sharp enough to recognise what he was holding. Mawson named the new uranium-bearing mineral davidite, after his mentor, the geologist and Antarctic explorer Sir Edgeworth David. The deposit was first called Smith's Carnotite Mine; in September 1906, Mawson proposed a better name. Radium Hill. The rock also held a chemist's cabinet of other minerals - rutile, ilmenite, magnetite, vanadium, molybdenum - threaded through quartz and biotite.
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 bromide it produced went to the frontier of science: into research on radiation and radioactivity, and into the hands of the pioneers themselves. This was the era when radium seemed almost magical, a substance that glowed in the dark and promised to cure cancer and power the future. The first phase of mining ceased in 1914, and the Hunters Hill refinery closed the year after. A second phase ran from 1923 to the early 1930s, with a treatment plant at Dry Creek near Adelaide making radium bromide for medical use - until it, too, proved uneconomic and shut down.
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 davidite ore. The concentrate went to Port Pirie for hot acid leaching, yielding about 860 tonnes of uranium oxide worth more than £15 million. A town grew up around the workings, home at its peak to some 1,100 people - with a swimming pool to soften the desert heat. Then the supply contract was filled. On 21 December 1961 the plant was officially decommissioned, the town was abandoned, and the buildings were demolished or carted away. The careful infrastructure of a thousand lives became foundations and rubble.
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 who had spent two years or more in the shafts, the report found that 59 percent had died of cancer. These were men who breathed radon and dust in an age that did not yet reckon with the cost, and many paid for it with their lives. The expertise gathered here did endure - it seeded the Australian Mineral Development Laboratories, founded in 1959 - and from 1981 part of the site was gazetted as a repository for low-level radioactive waste, receiving its final consignment in 1998. But the truest legacy of Radium Hill is the ledger of those workers, a reminder that the atomic age was built by human hands and paid for with human lives.
Radium Hill sits at 32.30 degrees south, 140.67 degrees east, in the arid Olary region of far-northeastern South Australia, on the Barrier Highway corridor roughly 100 km west of Broken Hill. From the air this is austere saltbush and gibber country - flat to gently undulating red-brown plains with little relief. The site itself is subtle: look for the geometric scars of the old township grid, the capped shaft area, and the fenced waste repository, set against an otherwise featureless landscape threaded by the thin grey line of the Barrier Highway and the parallel rail corridor. Nearest sizeable airport is Broken Hill (YBHI), about 100 km east; Olary has only a basic strip. Recommended viewing altitude 4,000-7,000 ft to pick out the faint man-made geometry against the desert. Visibility is usually outstanding in this dry interior, with the main hazards being summer heat haze and occasional dust storms that can drop horizontal visibility sharply.