Tears of the sun
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 28: Still the Lucky Country?
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Kathy Marks
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Kathy Marks' biography and other articles by this writer
As you fly out of Perth, heading east, the wheat and sheep country cushioning the world's most isolated capital city quickly recedes. The already sparse signs of settlement diminish, and soft yellows and greens give way to the harsh rust-reds of the continent's interior. But this is not the mostly flat, mostly featureless landscape characteristic of much of central Australia – not nowadays, anyway. This is a landscape pockmarked with man-made hills, and gigantic holes gouged out of the earth. This is gold country.
Of all those holes, none other compares with the Super Pit, one of the biggest craters ever dug by man – so vast that it can be seen from space, and is even reputed to influence the weather in Kalgoorlie, the hard-bitten town crouched on its rim. One of the richest goldmines on the planet, the open-cut pit will be 3.6 kilometres long, 1.6 kilometres wide and 650 metres deep when a current expansion program is completed. The creation of Alan Bond, it is the thrusting symbol of the Australian mining industry, an industry that has shaped multiple aspects of the modern nation, while underpinning the economy and, recently, enabling the country to weather the global financial upheaval with little more than a scratch.
It was in this remote and desperately arid corner of Western Australia that Paddy Hannan and two fellow Irish prospectors made camp in 1893, after one of their packhorses threw a shoe. Ever alert to the potential of virgin ground, they kept their eyes firmly down and spotted several nuggets in a gully. Before long they had collected a hundred ounces of gold, and within three days hordes of men were pegging out claims on what became known as the Golden Mile. It was the beginning of Australia's last and greatest gold rush – ‘the rush that never ended', as they call it in Western Australia, after the title of Geoffrey Blainey's classic history of the mining industry.
More than a century on, the goldfield that Hannan discovered – and the hundreds of ore bodies in and around Kalgoorlie – is still being worked with the same intensity: by thousands of lone prospectors, hoping for their own lucky strike, and by companies large and small. At the Super Pit, where hundred-metre-high slag heaps loom up against the horizon, the blasting, shovelling and crushing go on twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. As I watched the oversized dump trucks, laden with rock, toil up the pit face, then descend, empty, to be loaded again, it struck me that this hole, evocative of unbridled ambition and perhaps even hubris, also represents something quite primal: man's millennia-old mania for digging up the treasures in the earth's crust, and the gamble upon which the mining business has always been predicated.
When Blainey's book was first published, in 1963, gold was in long-term decline, and by the mid-1970s headframe lights were dimming across the Golden Mile. However, new technology and the emancipation of the gold price resurrected a dying industry, and in the early 1980s another boom began. In recent times the price of gold has risen spectacularly, and all over Australia drill holes are being sunk, mothballed mines are being reopened and existing ones are being enlarged. Meanwhile, after a blip lasting barely a year, other mineral and energy resources are being shipped overseas as fast as they can be scooped out of the ground.
In Perth, the cafés are bursting and the traffic is beyond belief: a sure indication that the good times have returned. With China barrelling ahead in its industrial revolution and India not far behind, demand for Australia's raw materials is expected to climb even higher. Yet amid the euphoria – felt most keenly in Western Australia, the nation's resources powerhouse, but also beyond – there is an undercurrent of disquiet. How wise is Australia to stake its future on an industry reliant on finite reserves and fickle commodity prices? How sustainable is mining, with its colossal environmental footprint? And just who is reaping the rewards?
SOON AFTER 2010 dawned, I stood calf-deep in a tranquil creek, swishing gravel and sand around a dish while carefully watching for ‘colour'. At this same spot in April 1851, John Lister and William Tom noticed gold glistening in a rock crevice, then, a little way downstream, came across a two-ounce nugget. Three years after the start of the California gold rush, they had found Australia's first payable goldfield, thirty kilometres north-east of Orange, in the undulating countryside beyond the Blue Mountains. The site was christened Ophir, after the biblical city of gold, by the man who had identified the area's promise: Edward Hammond Hargraves.
Gold. No other element on the periodic table – not platinum, nor carbon, the source of diamonds – has seized the imagination in the same way, nor ignited such passions. The Incas called it ‘the tears of the sun'; the Egyptian pharaohs were buried with it; for thousands of years it has occupied a unique place at the heart of civilisations. Deposited in quartz veins hundreds of millions of years ago by fluids surging up from the earth's molten core, gold has driven people ‘to travel the globe...to lie and cheat, to suffer and speculate, to risk their lives, to move mountains and reshape the landscape', according to Gold: Forgotten Histories and Lost Objects of Australia (edited by Iain McCalman, Alexander Cook and Andrew Reeves; Cambridge University Press, 2001). Symbolic of wealth, power, beauty and immortality, gold has tantalised and tormented men, fuelled and funded wars, propped up currencies, permeated languages, and spawned innumerable myths and legends.
Like most people, I'm familiar with the glamorous metal. But the first time I held a chunk of raw gold in my hand, fresh from the ground, I felt a little dizzy. It was so shiny, so yellow, so solid, and as I turned it over I caught a faint glimpse of what sends folk crazy. The shy, lanky man who showed it to me had sold his home and business in Perth in order to move to the Eastern Goldfields, around Kalgoorlie, and prospect full-time. I met Brad Parslow outside a shop in Boulder, Kalgoorlie's faded twin town; he was heading back out bush, and when I asked him if he'd had any luck, he reached into his canvas shoulder bag and took out a Tupperware box containing a three-ounce nugget – which, on that day in early December 2009, was worth US$3,624: not bad for an afternoon's work. (One troy ounce is 31.1 grams.)
In central New South Wales shepherds tending their flocks had been picking up gold long before Lister and Tom, but the metal's existence was apparently hushed up; according to one tale, Governor Sir George Gipps, on being presented with specks of gold by a geologist and Anglican clergyman, the Reverend William Branwhite Clarke, spluttered: ‘Put it away, Mr Clarke, or we shall all have our throats cut.' His fears proved unfounded; however, when news did get out, ‘a great excitement unhinged the minds of all classes of the community', writes Manning Clark in A History of Australia (abridged version, Pimlico, 1995).
There's not much gold left at Ophir; in fact, there's nothing much at all – just a commemorative obelisk; a few crumbling headstones in the overgrown cemetery; a landscape pitted with old shafts, mullock heaps and wide tunnels carved out of the hillsides; and the once richly endowed creek, still blithely babbling in the shade of gracefully inclined casuarinas. In 1851 there was a chaotic township, complete with school, post office, police station, apothecary, hotels and sly-grog sellers, while the diggings, according to a letter to the Bathurst Free Press in June that year, were so crowded that ‘in some spots the miners stand so close together that their picks have to be very carefully used to prevent them from striking each other.'
An estimated three thousand people worked Ophir's stony ground at its peak; the frenzy was short-lived, though, and many miners decamped to the more promising Turon River, to the north-east. In August 1851 the bountiful goldfields of Ballarat were discovered, followed by those of Bendigo and Beechworth. Australia's first real gold rush was on, with fortune-seekers from around the globe converging on Victoria's so-called Golden Triangle. At home, police and soldiers deserted their posts to dig for alluvial gold; ships docking in Melbourne were abandoned by their crews. Geoffrey Blainey writes in The Rush that Never Ended: ‘Shopkeepers and employers found the relationships of society reversed. Calling at the blacksmith to shoe their horse they found his door locked...Their children returned from school to report the master had gone...Preachers looked down from pulpits and denounced avarice to congregations empty of men' (fifth edition, MUP, 2003).
Although the rush was mostly over within twenty years, Victoria – and its capital city, which metamorphosed into ‘Marvellous Melbourne' – would never be the same. For the other colonies, too, it was a turning point: the country's population nearly tripled during the 1850s, to more than a million, as migrants arrived not only from Britain and Ireland but China, the United States and all over Europe. At last Australia had the massive influx of free settlers it coveted; breakneck economic growth boosted the living standards of a society until then largely dependent on agriculture, and as major gold seams were located, in turn, in Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia, each received an injection of wealth and people. Far-flung regions were opened up, with inland towns established and linked by railway to the coast. And Australia's international image was transformed: rather than a dreary outpost of Britain or a convict dumping-ground, it became a promised land.
Today it is the world's second-largest gold producer, behind China, and gold is its third-biggest export, after coal and iron ore, worth $17.5 billion in 2008-09. Yet gold, notwithstanding its allure, has relatively few practical applications, unlike, for instance, that most basic of industrial raw materials, iron ore. In the Pilbara region of Western Australia, iron ore is mined in prodigious quantities – and it is in the Pilbara that the reality of Australia being a quarry for Asia really hits home.
THE SKYLINE IN Port Hedland, 1,630 kilometres north of Perth, is dominated by towering red stockpiles: iron ore, awaiting shipment to China's steel mills. Red dust coats pavements and lawns in the small, somewhat unprepossessing town, where every other building seems to be a gleaming mine company headquarters. Port Hedland is often referred to as the engine room of the Australian economy; visiting for the first time, I found it hard not to think that the iron ore companies, particularly Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, own the Pilbara. Need a motel in Tom Price, the spick-and-span mining community rising from a baked landscape 430 kilometres south of Port Hedland? You'll have to call Rio Tinto's reservations service. (All rooms are booked up months in advance.) Want to drive from Tom Price to the port of Dampier? Sorry, that road is owned by Rio Tinto, although they might let you use it if you ask nicely. Fancy a walk in the fresh air? Try the BHP Billiton Marapikurrinya Park in Port Hedland, where you can also ogle the enormous bulk carriers. Or, you could go hiking in Rio Tinto Gorge.
The rust-coloured gorges of the Pilbara's Hamersley Ranges caught the eye of the late mining magnate Lang Hancock in 1952, when stormy weather forced his plane to fly low over the area. One of the most significant deposits was unearthed at Mount Tom Price, where, three or four times a day, a 2.5-kilometre-long train departs for Dampier, carrying more than 16,000 tonnes of iron ore. (The railway is privately owned, naturally.) If that sounds like a lot of ore, consider this: Tom Price is only one of eleven Rio Tinto mines in the Pilbara, producing 220 million tonnes a year. Then there are BHP's seven mines – another hundred million tonnes – as well as the lesser players, chief among them Andrew ‘Twiggy' Forrest's Fortescue Metals, which exported twenty-seven million tonnes in its first year.
Tony Dekuyer gave up his job as a maths teacher at a private Catholic boys' school in Perth in 2006 to drive trucks at Rio Tinto's West Angelas mine. Set against a billowing backdrop of saltbush, spindly trees and red sandhills, West Angelas consists simply of the mine, an airstrip and an accommodation camp. The nearest town, Newman, is 110 kilometres away. Dekuyer's wife, Janette, also worked at the site; for two years, the couple occupied adjacent huts at the camp, returning to Perth one week in three to watch their adult sons play sport, catch up on the gardening and enjoy the café lifestyle. Dekuyer, fifty-one, has now gravitated to a position in the operations centre in Perth, where he earns ‘just over double' his teacher's salary.
Everyone at West Angelas has signed up for the ‘fly in, fly out' (FIFO) regime that is increasingly the norm in the Australian resources industry, as new mines, many with short lifespans, open up in isolated spots. For the workers, FIFO means long periods away from home and life in a camp which, despite being well equipped – canteen, wet mess, gym, tennis courts, internet access – has no frills. The wages help to compensate (truck drivers earn about $150,000, including allowances; train drivers up to $210,000) – so much so that some miners commute from Brisbane and Sydney. Tony Dekuyer, who has bought himself a Ducati motorbike (Janette has a convertible sports car), reflects: ‘Teaching was very rewarding in many ways, but mentally it was quite exhausting. Here, when the day finishes, it finishes, and you don't have to think about the job at all.'
At Rio Tinto's mines, nearly a third of truck drivers are women. Kylie Piggott spends her waking hours perched eight metres off the ground, driving back and forth to the West Angelas pits. Each trip she collects 240 tonnes of drilled and blasted rock, then, following instructions on a computer screen, transports it to the crusher, stockpile or dump. Piggott, twenty-five, has to climb three metal staircases to reach her cab; the vehicle's tyres alone are twice her height. She says: ‘The cabs are air-conditioned and you can play your own music. It's like a little world of your own up there. It's pretty relaxing, although it can be lonely too.'
Young women like Piggott are the new face of the industry, according to mining executives. But you don't have to look far for a more familiar face. On a Sunday afternoon in Tom Price – 340 kilometres from the hottest town in Australia, Marble Bar – I meet Ross, Digger and Pirate in the crowded beer garden of the Tom Price Hotel Motel. Ross is a boilermaker from Queensland with a long, shaggy beard, grey ponytail, beer belly and eye-catching array of tattoos. He spends nine days of each month in Perth with his partner. ‘Do I miss home? Hell, yeah,' he says. ‘But it's very good money: that's the trade-off. I'm prepared to do the hard yards in the short term in order to pay off the mortgage and create a bit of wealth. But it can be really hard on your relationship, and the evidence is all around you.'
Digger, a short, voluble man who disappears to buy a round of drinks and returns with a blowsy girl on his arm, has three broken marriages behind him. A miner since the 1970s, he believes the industry is far more civilised nowadays. ‘It was rough back then. It was all single men, and the wet mess was open twenty-four hours, and there were fights breaking out the whole time.'
What about the lifestyle now? Ross sighs. ‘It's a small town in the middle of nowhere. It's stinking hot in summer and freezing cold in winter. If I could make the same money at home, I wouldn't be flying away.'
