Beneath the dust, surprise: Mount Isa's secret mine, lake and fine dining

Mount Isa sizzles in summer. Just ask caravan park co-owner and Outback Queensland ambassador Kylie Rixon who once forgot to collect her chooks' eggs (or bum-nuts, to use her colourful parlance) from their fluffy butt hut (chook pen) on a day when the mercury hit 50 degrees Celsius. By the time she fetched them in the afternoon and cracked open one, it fell out of its shell already cooked.

After 26 years of living here, Rixon is used to Mount Isa's furnace-like temperatures but visitors usually avoid them, instead heading to this part of north-west Queensland in winter - a much more temperate time of year known as "outback season".

Many are road-trippers and caravanners who might base themselves at Rixon's Sunset Tourist Park so they can explore the mining city that recently celebrated its centenary (prospector John Campbell Miles pegged out a lease here in 1923 and the formidable Mount Isa Mines was established the following year). I touch down to embark on a fly-drive adventure, landing at the airport amid a neon sea of high-vis workers about to clock on for the week.

Arriving by air, I've already had my expectations upended. Mount Isa, nicknamed "the Isa", is a jolt of green - an unexpected oasis tucked into rumpled, red-earth surrounds. Like Broken Hill in outback NSW, its silhouette is defined by mining - here, the visible infrastructure is a constant reminder that the city wrote itself into the history books as the world's largest single producer of copper, silver, lead and zinc.

However, this city of 19,000 residents now finds itself in flux following news that copper operations are set to close later this year. "There are always ebbs and flows ... but what goes down comes up again," says the optimistic and always smiling Rixon.

With mining defining the city from the get-go - Rixon says "the mine has made us who we are" - the industry also looms large for visitors. The key attraction at Outback at Isa, a tourism hub incorporating a visitors' centre, art gallery and fossil discovery centre, is a replica mine. Before climbing into a cage lift to descend 25 metres into the Hard Times Mine with a former miner-turned-guide, you don an orange jumpsuit, hard hat and headlamp.

With authentic equipment in the mine, multiple tunnels to explore and a crib room where refreshments are served during the tour, it gives a good feel for what it must be like to work underground.

Another subterranean attraction is the Mount Isa Underground Hospital. After Darwin's 1942 bombing, it was feared mineral-rich Mount Isa could be next. Miners burrowed out four tunnels in just 15 weeks but, in the end, it was never needed as a place to stash patients from the nearby hospital.

Nowadays, you can time-travel to the 1940s by picking up a flickering hurricane lamp and traipsing after a guide into the earth to hear how the hospital was only rediscovered in the 1980s.

A group of teenage boys shimmied down a ventilation shaft and probably thought they'd discovered "the best cubbyhouse in the world", says Rixon, also vice-president of the attraction's board. They would sneak ciggies and light fires until, one day, a nearby resident spied smoke coming out of the hill and called emergency services. "The oldies knew it was there but ... it had overgrown that much it had just become redundant," says Rixon.

The tour also includes an above-ground quirk - a low-cost Tent House that helped solve a miners' housing shortage in the 1930s. The National Trust-listed 1937 structure, the last of its kind in Mount Isa, was relocated here from its original site in town.

If you're at the hospital for a twilight tour, you'll also (incidentally) catch one of the city's famously vibrant sunsets. That outback sky can also be soaked up from an elevated vantage point at City Lookout.

Another popular scenic spot is Lake Moondarra, a 20-minute drive north of the city. Relax among the peacocks that strut around the foreshore picnic areas. On weekends, the Isa's residents flock here to blow off steam by swimming, water-skiing and jet-skiing on the manmade lake that's also stocked with barramundi (no fishing permit required).

The writer was a guest of Tourism and Events Queensland.