Qualla: 1964 Mount Isa Mines strike

1964 Mount Isa Mines strike: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mart Moppel from Tartu, Estonia, CC BY-SA 2.0. He wore a red cap, and that was almost all most Australians knew of him at first. Pat Mackie - born Maurice Patrick Murphy in New Zealand in 1914, a man who had gone to sea as a teenager and spent fifteen years before the mast - had drifted at last to the copper, lead, silver and zinc city of Mount Isa. By the winter of 1964 he found himself, almost reluctantly, the most recognisable face of a workforce some four thousand strong, drawn from more than forty countries. The dispute that gripped this isolated outback city would run for thirty-two weeks and become one of the longest and most bitterly fought industrial battles in the nation's history.

Image: Mart Moppel from Tartu, Estonia | CC BY-SA 2.0

1964 Mount Isa Mines strike: A Company Town

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit kenhodge13, CC BY 2.0. To understand the dispute, you have to understand Mount Isa. This was a city built by and around a single enterprise. Mount Isa Mines - MIM - was the largest mining company in Australia, and in a town this remote it was also landlord, paymaster and the reason almost everyone was ...

Image: kenhodge13 | CC BY 2.0

1964 Mount Isa Mines strike: Working to Wage

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit kenhodge13, CC BY 2.0. The trouble returned in August 1964, after the State Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Commission rejected a proposal for a weekly pay rise of four pounds in place of higher bonuses. The miners responded not with an immediate walkout but with a slower weapon: they began to ...

Image: kenhodge13 | CC BY 2.0

1964 Mount Isa Mines strike: The State Steps In

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit kenhodge13, CC BY 2.0. As the deadlock hardened, the government of Premier Frank Nicklin reached for the powers of the state. On 10 December an order-in-council demanded that MIM employees return to contract work and expanded police authority to enforce it. Amended days later to permit the dismissal of...

Image: kenhodge13 | CC BY 2.0

1964 Mount Isa Mines strike: The Long Unwinding

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit kenhodge13, CC BY 2.0. Disputes like this rarely end in a single dramatic moment. Through February and March of 1965 this one simply unwound, as enough miners drifted back to work for production to resume. Yet the months of hardship were not for nothing. Many of the workers' demands were eventually wri...

Image: kenhodge13 | CC BY 2.0