Gold Rush

by Jim Richards

After Tennant Creek, Darwin (ten hours up the road) looked like paradise. I checked into one of the inner-city backpacker hostels. My job hunting to date had been somewhat ad hoc and I felt I needed to be a bit more systematic.

  At the public library I photocopied the Yellow Pages for mining and exploration companies. I then worked my way down the list, calling every company, always asking to speak with the exploration manager in order to circumvent being weeded out by the secretary. I needed to pitch directly to the person who was doing the hiring.

  ‘Hi, my name is Jim Richards. I’m a qualified geologist and am here in town looking for work. I can start immediately. Do you have anything?’

  Invariably, there was no work, but I did get to meet some experienced people who offered me advice and encouragement. There was significant unemployment among experienced Australian geologists, so I was a long way down the list. I drew a blank in Darwin.

  Not so Kylene and Leanne, who were in strippers’ nirvana. Darwin may not be the cultural capital of Australia, but when it came to exotic dancing, the locals knew what they liked.

  Reluctantly, I left the pleasures of Darwin and continued my odyssey westward. I travelled by getting lifts with locals or backpackers who had a car, stopping off and trying my luck in the few small towns along the way.

  The journey covered a vast, hot, arid and unpopulated landscape. The terrain was flat with occasional low-lying hills or mountains. Sun-parched scrub grew out of the red dirt that stretched to the horizon. It was a very different wilderness from the jungles of Guyana.

  On one stretch, we drove past the Argyle Diamond Mine in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. It was here that most of the world’s pink diamonds were mined. I promised myself I’d return on a prospecting trip one day.

  As I continued with my job hunt, I recognised a pattern. In the more pleasant towns, my enquiries were usually met with indifference. In the rougher places, where drunken bodies lined the streets, my calls were received initially with disbelief, followed by a friendly chat. To be fair, I was always treated courteously. An Australian in the UK pulling a similar trick would probably have been cut pretty short.

  After three more weeks, I ended up in Perth, the capital of Western Australia. I had enough money to last me a few more days and felt beat-up by weeks of fruitless phone calls; unemployment is the optimist’s curse.

  I booked into an appalling backpacker hostel in Lake Street, Northbridge. The crowded dormitory room stank of feet and you needed a couple of beers to dull your nose enough to sleep. The city itself was beautiful, with wonderful parks, friendly people and the cleanest and best beaches I had ever seen.

  I cracked on with the Yellow Pages routine. If I couldn’t find anything in Perth I wasn’t sure how I was going to be eating, far less working.

  Down the list: call, call, call; cross, cross, cross. There were many companies here in Perth, far more than I had seen in any other place, yet the replies were all the same. After several days, I got down to S: St Barbara Mines.

  ‘Yes, we do have a vacancy actually.’

  That took me aback. I was so conditioned to ‘no’ that I was only going through the motions. That afternoon I went in for an interview, for which I used up the last of my cash to buy a set of second-hand clothes and shoes from a charity shop, as my own gear was falling apart.

  ‘So, Jim, I gather you’re looking for a job as a geologist,’ the interviewer said.

  ‘Yes, I have experience from my time in Guyana and am keen to find some work here in Australia. I’m available to start immediately.’

  ‘Well done, Jim, you have the job. We’ll fly you out to Meekatharra tomorrow.’ The weary-looking personnel officer looked as pleased as I felt. ‘We’ll sponsor you to get your permanent residency, providing you pay for it and sort out the paperwork yourself.’

  I was somewhat taken aback by the speed of the easiest job interview of my life, and half-suspected that the only exploration geologist job available in the whole of Australia was not going to be a ripper gig. But I was not going to look this particular gift horse in the mouth.

  Eight of us on board a light aircraft approached our destination, flying in over red dirt as far as the eye could see, and then, finally, a few scattered houses and buildings. This was the town of Meekatharra, once described by a former prime minister’s wife as ‘the end of the earth’. We landed on the dirt airstrip and as I left the aircraft the heat hit me. It felt like walking into a blast furnace.

  I was driven 20 kilometres south to the St Barbara mine site. There was no fly-in fly-out (commuting by air every few weeks) here. Barring three weeks’ holiday a year, this would be my place of work, rest and play for as long as I was employed. It looked grim.

  Fred, the camp manager, showed me to my accommodation. He was an old European and, I was to learn, a Holocaust survivor, which put my own job-hunting travails firmly back into perspective.

  A youngish guy came up and introduced himself.

  ‘G’day mate, Grahame’s the name. Drop your stuff in your donga and come over to the wettie to drink some piss.’

  I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, but he seemed genuine.

  ‘Sure, I’ll see you shortly,’ I said.

  My donga was a small room with a bed, a desk and an air conditioner, one of five dongas in a portable unit. There were shared ablutions, laundry facilities and a small TV room. I retired to the wet mess to drink some piss, which fortunately turned out to be beer.

  The next morning at 6.30, with another two new employees, I turned up at the main office and reported for the site induction.

  St Barbara’s was a medium-sized gold mining company, at that time producing roughly 200,000 ounces of gold per annum (worth $240 million at today’s prices), all from the Meekatharra mine site. There were about a hundred employees, most of whom lived in the camp and a few who drove in daily from Meekatharra, 20 kilometres to the north.

  After being taught the site safety and vehicle rules, we went to the stores.

  ‘Hey, Mongrel, here are the new guys for their gear,’ shouted the induction officer at the storeman. I thought this was a bit rude, and gave the poor man a pleasant smile.

  We were duly kitted out with a hard hat, safety glasses and steel-capped boots. We walked out of the store, past a souped-up Ford F250 sitting on the red soil. Emblazoned across the top of the windscreen were the words ‘THE MONGREL’.

  A vehicle tour took us onto the active mine site. We started at the Go Line, where the daily morning meetings were conducted.

  The Go Line gave an excellent view of the active open pit mine. I looked out over a vast hole in the ground 750 metres long, 400 metres wide and about 100 metres deep: the South Junction pit, out of which 40 million tonnes of rock had been mined.

  The morning meeting was in progress: ‘… take out the rest of Flitch Nine, then get the gear back up to the clear zone, by which time the drill and blast crews should be ready for a fifteen hundred hours blast,’ said the mine manager.

  All management staff involved in the actual mining were at this meeting, and as they looked out over the pit they discussed how best to go about their daily activities.

  We continued our tour past the treatment mill.

  ‘If you ever smell bitter almonds, run like fuck,’ the induction officer said. ‘That’ll be cyanide leaking out of the mill.’

  ‘Does it leak often?’ I asked, suddenly very interested.

  ‘Every few days, but don’t worry mate, they have a siren.’

  I had no idea what bitter almonds smelt like but made a mental note about the running.

  At the end of the tour, I was deposited at the exploration geologists’ office. Nick Winnall, chief geologist, looked at me in a resigned way that said ‘another lamb to the slaughter’.

  It was here I met one of the few young, unattached females on the mine site. Liz was Nick’s secretary and a very popular girl.

  I was issued a near-new Toyota Landcruiser 4×4, wit
h a single cab and a flat tray at the back – in local lingo, a ute (utility vehicle). I was most impressed by my ute, which was far better than anything I had ever driven before.

  Nick accompanied me out to ‘my rig’, which was operating about 3 kilometres from the office. The drill rig was mounted on the back of a small truck and was operated by two men. As the drilling progressed, samples of the rock, each representing one metre of drilling, were caught in a metal tray and then dumped in lines on the ground to be later assayed for gold.

  The terrain was flat, red and dry, with irregular stunted trees and scattered grasses. Initially it was unremarkable, but as my knowledge of the geology increased, layer upon layer would appear. It was an ancient landscape; any lighter soil or sand at surface had long ago blown away, leaving behind a crazy paving of cobbles – ‘float’, to a geologist.

  Small hills broke through the flat cover. These were banded iron formations, deposited around 2.7 billion years ago when the first oxygen (generated by vast algal mats) appeared on earth. This early oxygen had rusted the oceans, the iron dropping out and forming rocks that were to eventually become these hills.

  I picked up some of the banded iron float, and when I wetted it I could see beautiful laminated bands of red jasper and black magnetite. Further north in the Pilbara region, variants of these rocks were being mined, generating great wealth for Western Australia and for three dazzlingly rich families (the Hancocks, Wrights and Rhodes – no relation to Cecil), who had inherited the royalty streams from these mines.

  I learnt my trade bit by bit. Nick was a good teacher, and one of the other geologists could always answer a question. Drilling and logging up to fifteen holes per day gave me an excellent appreciation of the underlying geology.

  The rocks I had studied in Guyana were on a different continent, yet they were essentially the same as here in Western Australia: the same age (Archaean, 2.6 billion years old), the same geology (greenstone) and similar weathering (tropical).

  The weathering profiles changed markedly depending on the underlying bedrock. With experience you could accurately predict what rock you would encounter at the bottom of each hole. The iron-rich rocks (greenstones) formed deep red soils, the silica-rich granites formed an extremely hard silcrete cap (remobilised silica) and so on. Before long I could read the ground well and target the most prospective areas; rather than just looking at the flat plains, I saw a three-dimensional picture of the geology.

  With ten drilling rigs and ten geologists going full blast at a prospective greenstone belt, there were some lucrative new gold discoveries. In the late afternoons we plotted up our drilling assay results and geology on cross sections (side-on views) in the office, trying to figure out where to drill next. Ross Atkins would often wander in.

  Ross was the managing director of the company and something of a legend in the industry. He had started out fifteen years earlier as a truck driver, pegging a few leases here and there, doing some small-scale alluvial mining and growing with the great gold boom of the 1980s.

  He eventually became the largest independent gold miner in Australia, and used his gold assets to float St Barbara Mines on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX). At this time, Atkins was fabulously wealthy, effectively a billionaire in today’s money. I tried to connect the dots as to how I could get myself into such an enviable position, but there were a heck of a lot of dots between me and Atkins.

  When I knew Ross, his liking for meat pies had gotten the better of him. He was quite short but seriously wide.

  ‘Found any gold, Jim?’ he would say as he wandered into the exploration office.

  ‘I’ve got a sniff here, Ross; still working on it,’ I would reply, showing him my sections.

  Ross would look at the assays. ‘Have to do better than that, mate,’ he would say.

  Ross gets mixed reviews in the goldfields. I found him engaged, interested and supportive. He spoke his mind, and even though it was ‘my way or the highway’ with him, you always knew where you stood.

  For some reason the sky in the Australian outback always seems much larger than anywhere else, and this heightens the impression of the immense size of the place. As the winter sets in, freezing easterly winds put evaporative ice onto any standing water and the previously hot days become bitterly cold.

  Every day I looked at the drilled rock cuttings with my hand lens, decided what it was, then recorded that on a log sheet. This could get busy, and often I trailed behind the rig as it zoomed off onto new holes. Just when I felt things were running out of control and I would never catch up, the drill rig would break down. This was a fairly regular occurrence.

  When one of these quiet moments presented, some of the more opportunistic geologists would grab a nap under a shady tree. In the poetic Aussie vernacular, this was known as ‘fucking the dog’.

  To counter this phenomenon, Ross Atkins would often be on patrol in his brand new Landcruiser wagon. This impressive vehicle was thus christened the DFB (Dog-Fucker Buster) by the geologists, who would give updates as to the DFB’s location in code on the radio.

  One hot afternoon, a colleague of mine was indeed busted by the DFB, as he slept in a copse with his legs sticking out of one of the windows of his ute. Ross woke him with a roar. The man didn’t last much longer at St Barbara’s.

  Towards the end of the working day, I would check and collect my drill rig samples for assay and take them into the assay lab, which was a part of the mine complex. I would then head to the office for a coffee and to mark up my sections, and to try and chat up Liz.

  Knock-off was around five. I would often head out and do some metal detecting for gold nuggets for an hour. I was in an ideal place for it, and although the ground had been heavily picked over since the 1980s, people were still finding pieces.

  You could metal-detect in most places and keep what you found, so long as you held a miner’s right. This is a permit, valid for life, giving you the right to prospect on Crown land (most of Western Australia). I purchased one from the mining warden in Meekatharra for a nominal fee and I still hold it to this day. The miners of the Eureka Stockade had campaigned for this right back in 1854, and it was their sacrifice that had led to the robust miner’s right system from which prospectors continue to benefit.

  One of my favourite spots for metal detecting was Nannine, an old gold-rush town 12 kilometres south of our camp. The place was nestled at the base of a hill, just above a salt lake whose shores were white and bitter with gypsum.

  Nannine had been the site of two famous gold rushes, the first in 1891 when over 700 men rushed the rich alluvial field picking large gold nuggets off the surface of the red earth. It was these exceptionally large nuggets that made Nannine famous. The second rush was in 1980, when metal detectors first appeared. Nannine was overrun by caravans and fortunes were made as a second hidden bounty of nuggets was found.

  There was virtually nothing left of Nannine township when I metal-detected there. What was once a substantial settlement had completely disappeared; this included the gold, because I never found a damned thing at the place. Nevertheless, metal detecting was fun and I did find the occasional modest nugget weighing a few grams. I wasn’t going to get rich out of it, but you never knew. This activity took my mind off work, allowing me to relax, and also kept me away from the temptations of the wet mess.

  Often I would just watch some TV, have a meal in the cook-house (which had excellent food), then head over to the wet mess for a couple of beers. Every fortnight on the Saturday was payday and we would all head into Meeka (as the locals called it) for a night out.

  There were three pubs in Meeka: the Royal Mail, which was ‘posh’ (you had to wear a shirt); the Exchange, which was not so posh (singlets, or work vests, were OK); and the Meekatharra Hotel, where you could drink butt-naked if it took your fancy.

  There were a number of active gold mines around Meeka and the pubs on Saturday nights were bursting. Skimpies (barmaids wearing lingerie, plus or minus tops) strutt
ed their stuff in high heels, attempting to wheedle tips off the inebriated miners by performing unlikely acts with ice cubes. The troughs that lined the base of the bars at the customers’ feet overflowed with gambling cards, and fights would go off at random intervals.

  Meeka was a raw mining town, where people earned good money and spent it as fast as they could. Mainly it went on alcohol, which was one of the reasons they were there in the first place. But everyone had a reason for ending up in Meeka, including me.

  Women, or the lack of them, were a problem and the nightly routine in the wet mess would run along familiar lines. In the early evening, sports-crazed, alcohol-fuelled talk would dominate. This would give way in the later hours to the melancholy of lost love. Finally the fantasies would take over.

  I have noticed that any geographically isolated group of men will always create a mythological place filled with gorgeous and willing women, and so it was in Meeka. The recurring tale in the wet mess was of the Mount Seabrook talc mine, located in splendid isolation 180 kilometres north.

  One miner who had worked there was a dump truck driver, Ronnie Root-Rat, so named because he had ten kids. Root-Rat was a wizened, balding fifty-year-old. He was also funny, charming, and had a strong interest in the fairer sex, or indeed just in sex. He ran the camp pornography library (before such things were online). During late nights in the wet mess, he would describe his former time at the talc mine.

  ‘The workers are all gorgeous young women, talc pickers, drafted there from Geraldton. They lose their dole money if they don’t go to the mine,’ Root-Rat told his wide-eyed audience. ‘No joking, fellas, they are fucking desperate. The guys working there are all old and married, so these sheilas just can’t get laid, it’s a turkey shoot. I was so shagged out, I had to barricade myself inside my own donga just to get some sleep. They were trying to rip my door off its hinges with their bare hands to get to me.’

  This did seem a bit rich, especially as the Root-Rat was no oil painting, yet it was a beguiling vision. He finished off his compelling tale by selling porn to the by now half-crazed miners. Well, he did have ten kids to feed.