John Campbell Miles discovered a massive outcrop of lead-silver-zinc ore in outback Queensland. The Mount Isa mines became one of the world's largest and most productive polymetallic operations. The harsh environment (extreme heat, isolation) created a unique, militant labor culture that frequently clashed with the owning company.

Mount Isa is the 'capital' of the Australian mining ballad tradition, producing a rough, masculine, and politically charged 'bush poetry' for the industrial age. The poet and songwriter 'C. J. Dennis' wrote in the vernacular of the 'common bloke,' but Mount Isa generated its own 'larrikin' poets who wrote from the bar and the smelter. The 1964-65 strike at Mount Isa produced a vivid body of 'protest verse' that was sung at picket lines. For contemporary Aboriginal poets from the Kalkadoon nation, Mount Isa is a site of land theft and environmental devastation, a 'scar' on the Dreaming, overlaying a radical critique of mining on the colonial history of the 'outback.'