Mount Mulligan
Mount Mulligan (Djungan: Ngarrabullgan) is a free-standing conglomerate and sandstone massif 18 kilometres long and 6.5 kilometres wide, rising to 400 metres above the Hodgkinson River valley. The mountain's sedimentary layers seem to be a remnant from the floor of a Mesozoic rift valley which extended between modern-day Laura and Dimbulah.
Ngarrabullgan contains the oldest known archaeological site in Queensland, along with ancient rock shelters and rare, threatened and endemic species and habitats. Djungan rangers work to manage Ngarrabullgan as a single and unified landscape.
Several coal seams, which outcrop on the massif's eastern face a short distance above the valley floor, are of Permian origin, probably formed around the same time as the Bowen Basin and eastern New South Wales coalfields. While the seams' contents vary in quality from bituminous to nearly anthracitic, the seams are mixed, and it was difficult to separate different grades of coal suited to specific applications — modern miners prefer to exploit large deposits of a single grade — such considerations were less important when local gold miners identified the seams in 1907 at a time when Northern mining entrepreneur John Moffat needed coal to for the smelters at nearby Chillagoe.
The former coal-mining township that experienced Queensland's worst mining disaster on 19 September 1921. The mine closed, but reopened in 1923 and continued in production until 1957, when the Tully Falls hydroelectric scheme, Queensland Railways' transition from steam to diesel power and other factors eliminated much of the demand for coal from an inefficient mining operation.
