Horizon
Page 42
Loaded iron-ore trains gain on us and roll past as we drive north, trains too long for us to be able to see both ends in the same moment, each end lying as it does over the curve of the earth. The longest train ever documented passed this way in 1993. It consisted of 682 iron-ore cars, pushed from behind and pulled ahead by eight diesel-electric locomotives. It was nearly four and a half miles long and was carrying 110,000 tons of ore. During each twenty-four-hour cycle in the Pilbara, approximately eleven such trains arrive at Dampier and Port Hedland. Most are composed of more than three hundred cars, each bearing about 160 tons of pulverized ore. The dark umber mounds sitting inert in the cars, leveled off in the shape of neat trapezoids, follow each other like a series of mountain ranges.
At some point on the Tom Price road we cross a broad dry watercourse, its floodplain bounded on either side by a gallery forest of gum trees. On our right at that moment an ore train is passing. On our left a group of eight Aboriginal people are standing still in the riverbed, fixated on the train. Dressed in threadbare clothes, carrying cloth bundles holding their possessions, the group has the look of an extended family. For people whose psychological anchor in stressful times is in part the immediacy, the intimate closeness, of the physical country they were born to, and whose guiding stories are inextricably woven into that land, the passage of the train is traumatic. Its very presence signifies their loss of ownership and denial of access to their ancestors’ lands. This is an old story in Australia, in the Americas, on the Tibetan Plateau, and elsewhere. But now, before them in the cars, is the very country itself, being shipped off somewhere. For a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew, it would be as if Jerusalem and the ground it stood on had been put through a rock crusher, and the gravel of the tombs, the temples, the churches, and the prayer walls had been hauled away by NASA to build dormitories on the moon.
We were enveloped regularly by dust storms as we drove the Tom Price. They forced us to slow down, in order to keep the near left edge of the dirt road in sight. These rolling storms of fine powder—of “bulldust”—arrived with, and then trailed far behind, a kind of vehicle I’ve not encountered anywhere else but in Australia’s parched outback. A road train, a conventional long-haul road tractor pulling a long string of trailers. Most of the trucks that pass us are hauling mining equipment—steel drums of engine lubricants and fuels, dry stores, pipe sections, machinery, and motorized vehicles—utility tractors, small pickup trucks, D4 bulldozers. The mixed load of material is chained down on flatbed trailers. As many as four of them might be lined out behind a tractor, each trailer riding on six axles (three forward, three aft), each axle supported by six tires, three to each side. Sometimes the cloud of dust that shrouds the road is being thrown up by more than a hundred and forty tires. The tractors, most of them sporting twin chromed smokestacks, are festooned with banks of driving lights and protected forward by a rampart of chromed steel bars called ’roo bars, mounted there to ensure that the impact of a large animal struck head-on won’t damage the radiator or slow down the tractor. Behind the tinted glass I could never quite catch the cast of the drivers’ clean-shaven faces, only the suggestion of the body’s determined lean, the glare of mirrored sunglasses, a sleeveless white shirt.
We stopped one afternoon for lunch at an oasis of shade trees and limpid cold flowing water called Millstream, once the headquarters of a homestead and now part of Millstream Chichester National Park. A pipeline originating here carries water sixty miles north to Dampier, that town today an entrepôt for the mining industry. Before that it had been a pearling center (until the pearls were gone), and before that a whaling town (until the whales were gone).
As we pulled into Dampier and drifted slowly down its streets toward our motel, I recognized the familiar trappings of towns I’d passed through in other places where the extraction of natural resources—fish, trees, coal, rare earths, oil, diamonds—fuels economic development. An isolated terminus erected on a pounded landscape. Someone here has planted but not regularly watered a few wilting saplings. In a weed lot, which seemingly belongs to no particular building, millions of dollars’ worth of derelict machinery sits rusting. The air is rank with hydrocarbon fumes and is headachy to breathe. Ramshackle houses abut tidy prefabricated warehouses. The parking lot at the motel is littered with cigarette butts, crushed beer cans, fast-food wrappers, glass shards, and bits of clothing. It gleams with spills of food grease and oil from dripping engines.
The air in the bar attached to the hotel is thick with cigarette smoke and hammered by thudding, raging music. Women in tight, skimpy clothes sashay past tables where knots of men fall silent, as if a shark were passing their life raft. The seven of us take our beers outside, onto a shaded patio, out of the air conditioning and into the night heat and humidity. A safer, less crowded, less desperate commons.
I feel a strange affection toward most of the men in the bar, that more than disdain. I can easily imagine anyone here might say, out of hearing of the others, that they feel trapped by the circumstances they find themselves in. Love gone sour at home, mortgages to be paid, college for the kids to save for so the kids don’t have to invest in some version of the treadmill work their dads are indentured to. You work every day, then search out an anesthesia that will bury the anger and ennui the work fills you with.
The deeper one pushes into the pall of violence and despair created among too many working people by the extractive industries that employ them—corporations off the leash of government restraints, their policies framed by a relentless quest for strong profit margins, all of it driven hard by men and women on trading floors in Hong Kong, New York, and Frankfurt—the more difficult it is to identify a villain in the fin-de-siècle morality play unfolding here.
The truth, one tends to think, is that all of us, drunk or sober, sedated or not, aggrieved or manic, live consciously or unconsciously within this maelstrom, which no one really wants to risk shutting down. Some of the men I sit with for a while at the bar in Dampier tell me they are making $250,000 a year working in the ore pits, two weeks on, two weeks off. They believe they will outdistance Death, and that those lying dead by the side of the road are just unlucky, no concern of theirs. They’re happy with what the job provides, and they are confident that anyone who wouldn’t trade places with them is simply dense. When they head for the men’s room, they walk with a swagger I’m guessing they learned from watching cowboy movies. They sit at the barstools with that same swagger. They remind me of the two men who compete in a footrace in a story by Jorge Luis Borges, “El Fin.” The men, racing furiously side by side, are both beheaded in the same instant. The money down is on which body will run the farthest before collapsing.
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THE FIRST MORNING in Dampier, our escorts from FORM have arranged for us to see the Burrup Peninsula. A mammoth desalinization plant has been built here alongside a petrochemical plant, which is the terminus for a natural gas pipeline laid out on the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Plans for a nitrate plant, working in tandem with the petrochemical plant—which uses salt from the desalinization plant, combined with ammonia, to produce chlorine gas—will produce explosives to clear more land on the peninsula for additional plants and industrial infrastructure. The industrial development is considered economically feasible because funds from iron-ore mining are expected to last at least another forty years. (On the day after we arrive in Dampier, the local paper carries a story about a new billion-ton iron-ore deposit located recently just south of the Pilbara.)
The people with FORM have no agenda for us. Their sole interest, it seems, is in gaining our impressions of the Pilbara as writers and artists, and in the publication of all this—our photographs, words, and paintings—to advance their primary goal of promoting a better conversation about the fate of the Pilbara and its people. They want something more enlightening than a fistfight between a drunken Aboriginal and a drunken truck driver in one of the Dampier bars a
bout what’s at stake, what’s being lost and gained. They want a better conversation than a shouting match with a middle-management executive at BHP Billiton.
It’s hard to understand how anyone can look at what’s happened to Aboriginals and their culture on the Burrup Peninsula and simply turn away, as if this cultural detonation is not happening. To merely bring up the subject of slavery or genocide, which underlie the varnished history of so many nations, mine included, is apparently to offer a calumny of some sort. The Burrup Peninsula, many academics maintain, was once the geographic center of the greatest array of rock art ever created. Thousands upon thousands of depictions of animals, of humans interacting, of spiritual drama and historical events once existed here. It was a Musée d’Orsay of petroglyphs and pictographs.
That morning in Dampier we were taken to see the fraction of what is left of this extensive outdoor gallery. Mark and I climbed a slope of boulders beneath a cliff face to get a close look at a four- or five-thousand-year-old pictograph of a now-extinct marsupial called a thylacine, and another of a second extinct animal, the flat-tailed kangaroo. All about us were dozens of other ancient glyphs. For diversity of imagery and density of depictions, the area has, arguably, no equal in the world.
In order to clear land for the nitrate plant, developers began removing hundreds of pieces of rock art with bulldozers, perhaps with the exculpating belief that a great deal of Aboriginal art would still remain intact elsewhere on the peninsula. When the traditional owners of this site, the Jaburarra, learned they couldn’t stop the bulldozers, they asked that, at the very least, the rock art not be crushed for use as foundation material. Might the rocks, instead, be moved to a kind of “graveyard,” to be surrounded by a cyclone fence, so that the artwork might in this way be cared for? They were told their wishes would be accommodated.
On a peninsula jutting out into the Indian Ocean, a place where the first white settlers repeatedly poisoned the Jaburrara’s water holes with arsenic and where, when that didn’t kill enough of them, they just started shooting the people, developers broke down 25,000 years’ worth of rock art and dumped it like so much construction debris in a single spot, which they surrounded with a cyclone fence. Like a quarantine station. The Jaburrara were left to sort the jumble out any way they could. The flayed walls of the caves at Lascaux and Chauvet, dumped in a barrow ditch.
The Jaburrara sorted it out. Some of the pieces were too large for them to reposition without heavy equipment, which they did not have access to. Images that were not meant to be seen by Jaburrara women, or not meant to be seen by male Jaburrara, were placed facedown. Images of lovemaking, which the construction crews ridiculed and lampooned as “Abo porn,” were wrestled over so they could not be seen. Images of beings who should not be forced to stare at the nitrate plant were turned to face elsewhere.
Our party was escorted by two local guides, one Aboriginal, one white. Sparks flew between them periodically, for example when the white man began interpreting the meaning behind some of the glyphs and the Aboriginal man, very disturbed by this, all but shouted at him, “They can’t be interpreted!” In the tension that persisted between the two throughout the afternoon, we saw the age-old collision of “scholarship,” on the one hand, and deference to mystery on the other. Without room for mystery and uncertainty, the Aboriginal man felt, there cannot be any truly intelligent conversation.
Paul wanted to climb a nearby rise to photograph the rock art graveyard from that height, and I accompanied him to gain the same perspective. “Mind the adders,” cautioned one of the guides, reminding us the loose rock and heavy grass here was a preferred habitat for Acanthophis antarcticus, the common death adder.
The cyclone fence around the catastrophic jumble of rock art sagged in several places where local white children, we were told, had scaled it to get inside the compound, in order to see the “dirty” Aboriginal art. Perhaps these were the same local children who had scaled the rock faces we’d clambered over that morning to paint their names and dates among the glyphs.
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THE DAY FOLLOWING, we drove east through Roebourne, where we visited with Aboriginal artists at a center run by FORM. Many of them were working in the well-known dot style peculiar to generic Aboriginal art; but others were experimenting, painting in different, mostly modern styles. Some paintings were so accomplished, and so evidently of the landscape we’d been traveling through for several days, they were spellbinding. A few appeared to be from the artist’s memory of a place that had once existed here, before roadways, industrial infrastructure, and permanent settlements had altered the view.
From Roebourne we proceeded to Port Hedland. In terms of tonnage of material exported, Port Hedland qualifies as the largest port in Australia. As we approached on the North West Coastal Highway, Mark, staring at it, spoke one word quietly: Mordor.
It did look like some version of Tolkien’s hellish fortress. In suspension above the town was an enormous cloud of orange dust, rising up from machinery that inverted ore cars to empty them onto one end of a conveyor belt. At the other end of the conveyor belt, the dust rose up again from the bulk loading of ore ships. Off to our right as we entered the town were gargantuan piles of white salt from a desalinization plant. The ground on either side of the road approaching Port Hedland was denuded and scarred by errant vehicles in a headlong rush, each driver bent on an errand of some sort, the lot of them raising a second layer of dust into the air. In my hotel room a placard warned not to drink the tap water, which is contaminated with heavy metals, and for the same reason, to limit myself to a single brief shower once a week.
Mark’s image of Mordor—the natural end, as Tolkien saw it, of the road to worldwide industrialization—was a bit of a stretch for me; but Tolkien’s evocation of the heathen brutality inherent in industrial development, and of the tyrannical rule of the psychopath Sauron, a figure of puerile greed and the pursuit of power for its own sake, was a characterization of scenes like this that I could not shake. Mordor is one of the most dehumanized landscapes in all of English literature. Once you’ve slipped behind the curtain in Port Hedland—the well-kept lawns, the fine restaurant, the comfortable motel we stayed in—the town seemed not only to be the future that many dread but also to represent the marriage of ruthless desire and short-term gain that has laid waste to villages all over the world.
The seductive power of this system of exploitation—tearing things out of the earth, sneering at the least objection, as though it were hopelessly unenlightened, characterizing other people as vermin in the struggle for market share, navigating without an ethical compass—traps people in a thousand exploited settlements in denial, in regret, in loneliness. If you empathize with the Jaburrara over their losses, you must sympathize with every person caught up in the undertow of this nightmare, this delusion that a for-profit life is the only reasonable calling for a modern individual.
The last evening we were together on our trip, our FORM escorts arranged for us to tour the Port Hedland harbor with the harbor master. Home construction in Port Hedland, we had already learned, is not able to keep pace with the expanding workforce needed here, where every hour of every day is a work hour. The harbor master is going to show us areas of the port, we’re told, that are closed to other visitors. (An underwater fence in the inner harbor protects workers from sharks and poisonous sea snakes; on days when the heat here is stifling, the men jump into the water to cool off.)
Iron ore, the “red gold” of Western Australia, is the state’s—and the country’s—most lucrative export. The Pilbara iron deposits were discovered in 1952. In 2009, BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, another giant of worldwide industrial mining, shipped 330 million tons of iron ore from this port, most of it to China. Despite the magnitude of this project, relatively few people are employed in the loading operations. Automated machinery and software programming, which create efficiency, substitute for a labor f
orce. (During our two-hour tour of the harbor, I see only one person, a deckhand smoking a cigarette and watching us from the shadows of his ship’s superstructure.)
The ore arrives from the mines on the south side of Port Hedland. The load from each car moves several miles on conveyor belts to the docks. A gantry system there directs the ore into the ships’ holds at the rate of 140 tons per minute. Each vessel loads 200,000 tons or more in about twenty-four hours. As we motor through the harbor, six ships are being loaded and five wait at anchor in the outer harbor. The average draft of an empty ore ship is twenty-five feet; of a fully loaded ship, fifty-five feet. In the process of being loaded while we cruise the harbor are the KWK Exemplar from Hong Kong, the Mineral Shikoku, the Silver Bell from South Korea, the Spar Leo from Norway, the Onga, registered in Panama but, like many of the others, headed for Asia. Emblazoned across the headwall of the Mariloula’s superstructure, in letters nine feet tall, are the words PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT.
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THE TOUR THROUGH the Pilbara has been tempering for me. Like many others, I hope to stay abreast of the scale of economic and social change in the world, and to be aware of the rate at which things are changing; but the scale and the speed of the changes is frequently beyond anyone’s grasp. Too much of what we expect to see appearing on the horizon with sufficient time to take preventive action has already become a part of our lives, entrenched before we notice that anything has happened.
When we returned to our rooms after the tour of the harbor, I sat out on the veranda that my room shared with several other rooms and watched the last of the sun’s light lose color on the ocean in the direction of the Burrup Peninsula. My appreciation of rock art aesthetics is not great, but the art vividly represents for me the long effort humans have made to understand the world they were living in at the time. Most of the petroglyphs and pictographs that I’ve seen evince, for me, both a sense of wonder about the nature of the world and, more subtly, an understanding that human beings do not control their own fate, that in some fundamental way humans are powerless to do so. From this, perhaps, springs both the notion of the existence of influential gods, beings to whom one can appeal, and a contrary notion, that a person is able to control his or her own destiny and, in some cases, the destiny of others.