A copper-gold mine owned by Peko-Wallsend. Produced 30,657 tons of Cu concentrate (1984) and 58,740 oz. Au (1983-84).

The Warrego mine is 50 kilometres north-west of Tennant Creek, and can be accessed via a sealed road from the town. The mine is not open to the public. The mine was developed during the early 1970's by Peko Wallsend, during a golden age for Tennant Creek, when several new mines were opened, on covered deposits missed by the prospectors in the 1930's. Production began in 1971, and a concentrator was erected the same year, in 1973 a smelter was added. A town for the workers was constructed, with two caravan parks, and a primary school. The deposit is considered a copper and bismuth mine, with minor gold. By 1975, it was producing 95% of Australia's bismuth. Later that year, 550 men were retrenched due to low commodity prices, and the town closed.

The mine produced in excess of 1.2 million ounces of gold, 80,000 tonnes of copper, 10,000 tonnes of bismuth, and is considered the largest mine in the Tennant Creek district.

Mining continued intermittently. One source states in the early 1980's, copper ore was being hauled by truck several thousands of kilometres to the Mount Morgan smelter in Queensland. The Warrego processing plant was at times used to process ore from other mines, like Chariot, White Devil and Black Angel. The processing plant was redeveloped in 2003, and operated until it closed again in 2005.

In 2015, Alice Springs scrap metal merchant Stewart Pritchard, and Kevin Craig, who operated a stamp battery at Menzies Western Australia, took out some of the dregs of ore left lying around the mine. They came to an arrangement with the Battery Hill tourist centre to repair the 1930's era battery on the site, which had not worked since 1982. This was then used to crush ore carted in from the Warrego mine, with tourists able to watch an operating stamp battery.

Little of the town remains, apart from roads, and concrete foundations. The mine site has a large tailings area, several buildings, a headframe, processing plant.

There are three ore lenses hosted by magnetite rich, ellipsoidal ironstone lodes, containing also quartz and chlorite. Economic mineralisation is chalcopyrite, bismuthinite, and native gold, which are located in fractures in the ironstone lode. The Hanging Wall is quartz porphyry. Warrego Granite outcrops less than one kilometre to the east, containing cordierite, biotite, and andalusite porphyroblasts. The ore body has rotated 90 degrees, due to the intrusion of the granite. The ironstone is located at the lower contact of the quartz porphyry, which acted as a barrier to the hydrothermal fluids, channelled to the site by a cleavage parallel fault, formed during the folding of the porphyry. The fluids then migrated laterally, replacing sediments with chlorite, magnetite, and quartz.

There two types of mineralisation: 1) Copper ore bodies of chalcopyrite, pyrite, pyrite/marcasite, and cobalt rich phases, located in the breccia core of the ironstone lode. There is an outer zone of relatively barren quartz-magnetite. 2) two distinct zones on the Footwall of a sulphide poor chlorite and muscovite rich mineral assemblage, with developed zones of Au-Bi-Cu, (un-named) bismuth sulphosalts, and magnetite-chlorite-muscovite, or magnetite-sulphides, or quartz-magnetite. Overprinting these is gold pods associated with the oxidation of pyrrhotite. Magnetite can be 50% volume of the host rock.

Other Regions, Features and Areas containing this locality

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