Mining

In this week’s ABR Podcast, we feature the third-place winner in this year’s Calibre Essay Prize, Nicole Hasham’s ‘Bloodstone: The day they blew up Mount Tom Price’. In preparation for the essay, Walkley Award-winning journalist Nicole Hasham travelled to the site of Wakathuni, the Pilbara mountain also known as Tom Price that was blown up in 1974 to mine iron ore. Listen to Nicole Hasham’s ‘Bloodstone: The day they blew up Mount Tom Price’, published in the July issue of ABR.

To obliterate a mountain, one must first drill a series of holes 2.4 metres deep – in either a square or diagonal pattern, depending on the rock type and face condition. A crew moves in to load the holes with blasting agent, typically a mix of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. Detonators and boosters are laid and an explosive cord is run over the mountain face. A fuse is lit. It explodes the detonator, which explodes the cord, which explodes the boosters, which explodes the blast mix, which in turn explodes the mountain.

Recently, mining giant Rio Tinto disturbed another ancient rock shelter in Australia’s Pilbara during a routine blast designed to ‘mimic’ the natural environment. This time, the company announced its transgression before it hit the headlines, presumably to avoid the kind of public outrage it faced after the Juukan Gorge incident in May 2020. What compelled Rio Tinto to admit wrongdoing, and to what effect? Does this pre-emptive mea culpa signal a new corporate sensitivity to Aboriginal culture and heritage, or is it a strategy to placate the Australian public so mining can continue? Analysing the factors that both enable and constrain mining on Indigenous peoples’ lands is the focus of Ciaran O’Faircheallaigh’s book Indigenous Peoples and Mining: A global perspective.

When BHP Billiton announced last month that it would indefinitely shelve its proposed Olympic Dam expansion in South Australia, some said it signalled the symbolic end of the mining investment boom. South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill’s reaction was particularly revealing. With his government now staring into a $1 billion black hole, Weatherill declared that he and the community had lost trust in BHP, and that the decision was a ‘major disappointment’. Many of Weatherill’s critics have suggested that his response betrayed his party’s zeal for the mining project, to the detriment of other sectors, with the sole aim of bolstering the state’s beleaguered economy. Putting ‘trust’ and ‘mining companies’ in the same sentence may be nothing more than political aikido. After all, given the tumescent economic growth that has come from the commodities rush, Weatherill’s reaction is predictable. Yet one can’t help but feel that his trust is misplaced.