Rum Jungle or Unrungkoolpum is a locality in the Northern Territory of Australia, about 105 kilometres south of Darwin on the East Branch of the Finniss River. It is 10 kilometres west of Batchelor and shares a boundary with Litchfield National Park. The joint traditional owners of this area are the Kungarakan and Warai peoples, and their rights to the land are recognised in the Finnis River Land Claim, which was granted in May 1981. The European name for this area derives from an incident in March 1873 when miners from the nearby John Bull goldmine met a teamster who was carting stores between Southport and Pine Creek. The teamster tapped a cask of rum that he was carrying and shared it with locals. After waking up from the effects of the teamster's hospitality, they found that he had stolen 750 ounces (21 kg) of their gold, along with their horses, and disappeared. Searches for the thief lasted for a number of months until he and the gold were found. The name was first used when reporting the death of Patrick Flynn in November 1873. Rum Jungle is best known as the site of a uranium deposit, found in 1949, which was mined between 1954 and 1971, producing 3,530 tonnes of uranium oxide, as well as 20,000 tonnes of copper concentrate.
History The first European person to travel to the Rum Jungle area was George Goyder in 1869. During his exploration, he noted an unidentified copper-like green ore at "Giants Reef", which was later "rediscovered" and identified to be torbernite. That discovery received minimal attention at the time and other European and Chinese people began occupying the area, especially after the discovery of gold in the 1870s. Prospectors also occasionally mined copper and other minerals on a small scale. Those new arrivals exposed the local Aboriginal people, the Kungarakan and Warai, to a variety of illnesses and diseases, including smallpox, leprosy and tuberculosis. Aboriginal people were also subjected to trauma including the sexual exploitation of women, forced migration and massacres. One such was the Stapleton Siding massacre in July 1895 in which 80 Aboriginal people were killed following the distribution of poisoned damper. Joe McGinness was told the story by his mother Alngindabu, who survived the massacre, and said of it:
The majority of the tribe (Kungarakany)... about one hundred people, became victims of poisoned damper... at a railway siding known as Stapleton... weed-killing powder... was supposedly mistaken for baking powder and added to the flour in preparing damper. Those who ate the poisoned damper became violently ill before their death. That was one of at least three poisoning incidents suffered by the Kungarakan people. One notable early resident was Nellie Flynn, who was only about 145cm tall and who arrived in the area in 1909. There she met her future husband, Tom Flynn, who was 189cm tall, and was believed to have walked the 2,000km from Cooktown, Queensland. Nellie Flynn lived in the area until the 1970s and became a well-known character.
Mining
Uranium mining In April 1948, a notice was published in the Commonwealth of Australia Gazette that the Government was offering a rewards of £25,000 for the discovery of uranium ore in Australia. The reward was offered due to an increased demand for uranium following World War II, and the United States and Britain had identified Australia as a potential source. In 1949, John Michael "Jack" White discovered torbernite in the shafts of old copper mines. White was a buffalo shooter, crocodile hunter and prospector, who ran a small farm in the area with his Aboriginal partner, whose name has not been disclosed. He recognised the uranium ore from a color pamphlet that had been produced as part of the announcement of the reward. He delivered his samples to the Mines Branch in Darwin on 13 August 1949, and was later able to collect the full reward. News of the discovery was published throughout Australia. In 1952, the Australian Government funded the setting up of a mine and treatment plant to provide uranium oxide concentrate to the UK-US Combined Development Agency under a contract which ran from 1953 to 1962. The mine was officially opened on 17 September 1954 by the Prime Minister Robert Menzies, who promised that "[t]he world will forget about atomic bombs and concentrate on using uranium for the benefit of humankind" while also talking about its importance in terms of the defence of Australia. On 13 September, days before the mine officially opened, four staff of the mine were killed when two trucks collided. The mine was the responsibility of Commonwealth Government, through the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, although management of it was by Territory Enterprises Pty Limited, a subsidiary of the Rio Tinto Group, on a contract basis. Batchelor, a nearby town, accommodated most of the mining personnel and grew significantly at that time. By 1959, the economically viable ore had been extracted but operations continued on a small scale until 1963. Other work continued there until April 1971, with stockpiled ore from Rum Jungle and other sites around Australia, including from Eva Creek and Adelaide River, continued to be processed. A total of 863,000 tonnes of uranium ore were processed and much was sold on the open market; some of this was also stockpiled and held in storage at Lucas Heights Reactor in Sydney.
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