The Best Australian Essays 2015 (13 page)

Yet, it could be transformed. As if by some strange force of transubstantiation, what was hauled out of the earth in the Pilbara turned up in Perth as slithery heaps of blue metal and yellow builder's sand. Everyone's family was renovating, pressing out, turning their wages into structures. We flung
boondies
at each other (hard pellets of sand: a Noongar word and the snowballs of the west) in the vacant lots of new developments, running through roofless houses and dry swimming pools. The outer suburbs wore an apron of land, ironed smooth in anticipation of future growth.

People, too, were changed by working in and travelling through the Pilbara – they returned wealthy, injured, muscular or drunk. They came back with new and unnameable ambitions. Tall shadows stayed behind them when they were on site and some remained shadows when they returned, possessed by an idea, a conviction or new habits. At the very beginning of that boom, the journalist Osmar White called it a ‘journey through the land of I-believe' in
Under the Iron Rainbow
(Heinemann, 1969). Faith that the ground would keep on relinquishing, and faith in the companies that turned it over.

There was a generative restlessness to the era of the second boom that I probably internalised – the idea that motion itself could be a moral conviction. All that exploratory pegging of the earth, the tunnelling down for fresh finds – that felt like expansion, like progress. Virtues like rigour, tenacity, even a feral kind of patriotism, underpinned that ceaseless exertion – men's labour plying loose the land. But those values were already beginning to fossilise. Advances in technology and mechatronics, coupled with increased capital costs, had long since collapsed the pioneering, individualist persona of the Australian miner and replaced it with foreign investment and the corporate superintendence of the region. Shrewdly, the ‘Big Miners' colonised the myth and repackaged it. They still do.

*

Nostalgia holds that the Pilbara used to be place of big personalities and unorthodox ideas. Where the self-made man was not just an economic category, but a civic one. Back then, it was always men. In the landscape they saw their inscrutability reflected. All that untrammelled, geologic tyranny, the scale of their success. Capitalism has relied on a roving class of workers pulled to manual labour, in agriculture and mining in particular. Historically, their living conditions were arduous. The Australian Bureau of Statistics might find it challenging to track FIFO workers through their residencies now, but consider that in the gold rush era of the mid to late 1800s most workers lived in temporary dugouts, shanties and burrows – actual burrows – which were hollowed into the banks of rivers and flooded regularly, fostering waterborne disease. They ate a scurvy diet. Backed into their dens and wrapped in oilskins, the dreams that drifted up to those men from the silted riverbeds were of twenty-three carat nuggets. It was a frontier and, as on all frontiers, hope was the main resource they mined.

The iron ore export embargo, put in place to reserve resources or national industry, was lifted in 1960. As Jennie Hardie recounts it in her 1981 report
Nor'Westers of the Pilbara Breed
, the initial celebrations in Port Hedland were lavish. At Poons' Mess on Spinifex Hill, locals were sumptuously wooed:

There the British directors of Goldsworthy Mining Associates disarmed residents with the promise of lush times ahead.
Fee-fi, here come the giants
. The construction crew that poured the first tennis court in the town consisted of Hungarian, Italian, German, Spanish, Latvian and Thursday Island labourers – the forefathers of the modern FIFO workforce. These were the men to become the lumpers, the graders, the drivers, the winders, the skippers and the miners. Later, a residual purple dust kicked up by the mine settled over everything in the town. White birds turned red and the mood changed.

Better the red air though, than the blue air of Wittenoom and Port Sampson, where fibrous asbestos was extracted and shipped. Workers, including George Aitchison, would later describe airborne asbestos ‘like a field of snow' on the jetty heads and ‘hanging like stalactites' from the rafters of storage sheds (
I've Had a Good Life
, Hesperian Press, 2010). Sad irony that this fibrillate mineral, touted for its life-preserving properties in proofing buildings against bushfire, should become the source of Australia's most savage, capricious and enduring industrial disaster. In Wittenoom, the boom slowed to a clotted rattling in the chest. Records show that, to date, the lung cancer mesothelioma, triggered by inhaling asbestos filaments, has taken the lives of more than 10,000 people Australia-wide.

By the 1970s, Lang Hancock wanted the country opened out along its north-west edge with nuclear bombs. The region was already haunted by mushroom clouds: in the 1950s the peace of the labyrinthine Montebello Islands, 130 kilometres off the Pilbara coast, was shattered by British nuclear tests. ‘I'd cheerfully eat lunch in an atomic crater,' Hancock said. Later came financial scandals. The Lalor brothers, Peter and Chris, descendants of Eureka Stockade bloodstock, whose first mine was engineered by the thirty-first President of the United States, Herbert Hoover, are still remembered with bitterness in the region. Under their stewardship, Sons of Gwalia was described by Alan Kohler in the
Sydney Morning Herald
(August, 2005) as running ‘a sort of movie-set township, with painted façades of profitability propped up by rickety hedging deals that were destined to fail'.

*

That the decoy penis, which suggested to me transgression, turns out to be an apparatus of control is emblematic of a lot of what's going on in the Pilbara now. Those japing mine names and the blood test dodging might be the last flickers of subversive spirit from a former age. What the FIFO workforces inhabit now is, to borrow from American author Rebecca Solnit's
Storming the Gates
(University of California Press, 2007), a ‘post-communal, postrural, posturban, postplace'. Economic personhood has supplanted frontierism and civic notoriety (let alone civic engagement). The idea of ‘the public' has been whittled back to its barest passible elements. People and machines are treated as interchangeable. Neither have a deep connection to the places they unearth or to the communities that are built there; that is, the communities that will remain there after the mines are depleted. The wages are colossal and the knock-on effects, in terms of local property prices, are extreme. Salaries in the north-west are, on average, two-thirds higher than the national median. Though there have been marginal decreases in line with the boom's decline, in 2011 an entry-level truck driver without mining experience was being paid $120,000 per annum, while a supervisor or foreman was earning anything between $135,000 and $230,000. It's still cheaper to fly cut sandwiches up from Perth than it is for a baker to live in Karratha. McDonald's decided not to open a store in Newman because of the lack of affordable housing for their employees. Meanwhile, in Perth garages, jet-skis and quad-bikes grown dusty from abandonment indicate the high-water mark of the boom.

Though the conditions in the camps have improved (air-conditioning, pay TV and ‘lifestyle consultants' all feature in the pitch), the hours are harder and the work is more isolating. Overseas staff from client companies can be on site for the duration of long projects, working twenty-four days straight followed by three days' ‘R&R' in Perth; they go back to their home country once every four months, for a week. There are more women working the mines today than in the 1970s and '80s – on site and in the engineering offices (though gender parity still doesn't extend to the boardrooms). I'm told by my female friends that the FIFO sites remain gruff in mood and vernacular, that it's hard to strike up sociable banter. When we get together they show me the explicit and uninvited texts received after dark – advice that if they hope to be ‘sorted out' they should leave $50 in the fridge for a cleaner. They recount sex-splashed stories from the wet mess, where the weak beer does little to water down the violence of fantasies retold. And each wonders aloud how much longer they will endure it.

The unions have won recent court battles, but the
modus operandi
of the big multinationals – which they aggressively pursue – is to negotiate individualised contracts with their workforce. Five-day weeks broken into eight-hour shifts have given way to back-to-back twelve-hour rosters, in a constant twenty-four hour, seven-days-a-week output cycle. After such shifts, it would reasonable to expect that getting a drink with your workmates – even sharing a conversation – might be a struggle. In early 2011, a 54-year-old man died in his donga in Karratha's Gap Ridge Village. No one noticed his disappearance for four days. This is the upshot of destroying connections between people and places: the connections of people to people are likewise loosened. Eventually they break.

On the streets in Perth now you see less of those T-shirts people used to wear that said something like ‘No Stop Work Injury Time: 112 Days!'. Workplace safety is the new dogma. Hearing booths, hydration assessments, three points of contact on a structure at all times. Carry clear, safety and sunglasses. But in a suburban Woolworths last Christmas I queued behind a man carrying five turkey rolls and wearing a shirt that read ‘FIFO – Fit In or Fuck Off'. The ubiquitous fluorescent gear that distinguishes mineworkers is banned in some Pilbara pubs as tantamount to gang colours, while the media links community perceptions of public safety in the region to the presence of FIFO workers (as do many community members). So the distance between the mine-site and the world beyond it grows longer. Who looks at the ore tumbling from the conveyor belt into the hold of the ship and wonders,
Whose country is that anyway
?

*

Mining's corporate history is long, but the world's oldest continuing mine, in the north of WA, was not dug for ore, gold or diamonds. Indeed, the mine sought no financial profit at all. At Wilgie Mia the commodity obtained was ochre. Wilgie Mia, in the Weld Ranges near Cue, is an eerie place where stopovers are ill-advised without the observance of strict cultural protocols. Long subterranean galleries follow dark red, yellow and green coloured seams. It is a ‘stop and pillar' mine, where the ceiling is supported by struts and scaffolding made from the rock. Some 14,000 cubic metres of stone and earth have been removed through careful engineering. The kangaroo,
Marlu
, was speared nearby in the Dreaming. The ochre at Wilgie Mia is tri-coloured for Marlu's blood, his liver and his gall, which all leached out when he fell onto the ground there. These minerals are called ‘sparkling' ochres because of their density and colour, and the fact that they do not aggravate the skin on application as a pulverised paste. The Wajarri Yamatji people, whose custody extends to the mine, have law practices involving the pigments that stretch back at least 30,000 years. The ochre was dispersed in pieces out to groups in the Kimberley, to the south as far as Ravensthorpe, and east into Queensland.

Yet, although Aboriginal people were this country's first working miners, the boom has consistently toppled, broken and unfastened their land from its original stories and storytellers. All that motion, all that transformation. Flying in, flying out. Even as digging tells a fresh story, it disrupts storied ground in ways that mean the telling can't be the same. What feels like progress in Perth can look a lot more like destruction on country. While the commercial and cultural inflections of the mineral industries are a part of the city's texture, our working images of mined spaces are few and limited. Those images are themselves carefully refined.

The most visible landscapes of the Pilbara now appear in art sponsored by the mining companies – photographic shows and publications like Edward Burtynsky's
Minescapes
(2008); the many design projects of form; and movies like
Red Dog
(2011) and
Japanese Story
(2003). These are the pictures that have rushed in to fill the hole called ‘Pilbara' that exists in the public's imagination. From far out, the sheer scale of development is sublime (as Burtynsky's photos, in particular, illustrate). Mount Whaleback, named in the 1950s for its rolling shape, today designates not merely the absence of a mountain but a mountain inverted: its five-kilometre ziggurat walls descend to a slot of olive-grey ground. As human activity digs deeper into that country, human imagination settles so lightly upon it – for these are places that are meant to be flown over, into and out of. To allow your mind to dwell on the meaning and history of the many alternative stories that emanate from the Pilbara is, in a way, politically radical. Such gestures refuse the corporatisation of our imagination.

‘The ore being ground, they divide it in several heaps and then begin to essay,' wrote an ‘unnamed scientist' in 1368 – the oldest usage of the word ‘essay', identified by John D'Agata in his edited anthology
The Next American Essay
(Graywolf Press, 2003). Etymologically, to essay once specified the weighing of metals. Weighing is contemplating, both palms up. Before that, ‘unearthing'. Turning things over to examine their underside (and the inching discoveries beneath). To essay then, is to dig the valuable material out of the mullock and set it on the scales. There is so much digging going on in this state; some of it gives, but what it gives isn't always fortuitous. Most of it takes. Here I am too, tiny pickaxe in hand, raking through the past.

*

My uncle told us other types of stories. Stories about alluvial gulches of red rubble that ran over dead watercourses, and how the stones clinked like spoons when you walked on them as they were made of so much iron. The sparse trees, he said, were glossy on one side of their trunks from the rubbing of cattle being driven past. I read of Dampier's great solar salt flats, which are periodically mowed. The mowing machines shave a thin crust of salt crystals off for sale to chemical factories. Those wet salt flats are inhabited by milkfish, introduced to control algae, and birds sometimes come to prey upon them – though they must not taste as mild as their name suggests, for all their lives the fish occupy the bitterns and brines and they are full of Y-shaped bones. Hardly any other animals can tolerate it. There are salt ‘gardens' too: smaller-scale operations, tended by salt gardeners who must feel a certain enviable pride when the light hits their immaculate paddocks in the morning, like so much unmarked paper.