Mount Isa's Underground Hospital was dug in 1942 after the bombing of Darwin, when the town's copper mine was considered a possible wartime target. Local miners excavated the tunnels behind the hospital so patients could be moved underground during air raids.
The air raids never came, but the tunnels survived. Today the guided visit shows how a full emergency hospital was fitted into a mine-like shelter, with wartime medical equipment and the Beth Anderson Museum collection alongside it.