But nobody ever doubted their love and fear of the mountain. Archaeologists have found evidence of Aboriginal spirituality dating from six thousand years ago, which would make it one of the oldest religions on earth to be practiced continuously. Part of the supporting data is an etching of a piscine creature believed to be the Rainbow Serpent, which was recently found on a cliff not far from Mount Brockman. The image was likely painted there in 4000 B.C., near the end of the last Ice Age, when sea levels were rising from the melting North and South Poles, disrupting the ocean currents and washing unfamiliar fish onto the shores. These fish had apparently been viewed as signs from heaven.
One hundred fifty miles away from the sacred mountain, near the marina in the seaside city of Darwin, is a house with striped awnings. I went there on a summer afternoon in January to see a man named Joe Fisher.
Nobody answered the front doorbell, so I went around the back to knock on the carport door. There were two cars, some garden supplies, and a paperback Louis L’Amour Western novel tented up on a TV table near the door, as if whoever was reading it wanted to enjoy it in the warmth of the outside.
An elderly woman came to the door, smiling, and led me into a television room. She then went to rouse her husband from his postlunchtime nap. After about three minutes, Joe Fisher, eighty-eight years old, emerged from the bedroom with a bowlegged stagger and extended a hand.
He still sported the trim Walt Disney mustache that had been his trademark in the uranium fields half a century ago. He was an agent of every exhilarating thing that had characterized Australian uranium in its postwar years: huge profits, cowboy adventurism, and a fierce, even quasireligious, belief in progress. Everything that distinguished Charlie Steen in America also belonged to Joe Fisher in Australia. Today, he is regarded as an éminence grise of the mining business, and I was urged to go see him while he could still recall details.
“We were independent in those days,” he told me. “No environmentalists to tell us what to do. We cut our own trees, built our own airstrips if we needed them. We would simply use a dragline behind a truck to tear the trees down. If you wanted anything done, you did it yourself. You didn’t rely on anybody else.”
He got into uranium not because he was fascinated with the mineral, but rather to make a little money. Fisher had spent his childhood in the 1920s chopping wood and welding engine parts for his father in the goldfields of Cape York, a dagger-shaped peninsula at the north end of the Australian continent. He learned early the basics of luck-and-sweat mining: shoveling tailings, lowering kibbles, and cutting down enough trees in one afternoon to produce half a cord of boiler fuel. After losing a finger to a generator fan, he was rushed three hundred miles to the nearest hospital and wound up marrying the nurse.
Fisher earned a degree in welding and drifted with his wife to one of Australia’s ragged places: the Northern Territory, a province of jungle and arid scrublands called the Top End, a place with an end-of-the-road mystique similar to Alaska except that the climate here is tropical instead of freezing. The pace of life slows to a crawl during the summer, a period known as the Wet, when rains inundate the northern seaboard and turn roads to gumbo. The capital is a port town at the edge of the Timor Sea named Darwin, whose natural harbor was spied from the deck of the HMS Beagle in 1839 and named for Charles Darwin, who had been on the ship as a naturalist on a previous voyage. From here it is nearly one thousand miles down a bitumen highway to Alice Springs, the only other territorial town of consequence.
Darwin has a history of destruction and repurposing. On the morning of February 19, 1942, five days after Singapore fell to the Imperial Japanese navy, a squadron of nearly two hundred bombers and fighters unleashed a raid on the city’s harbor and a nearby air base, sinking eight ships, destroying seventeen aircraft, and setting several storage tanks of oil ablaze. Most of downtown was flattened, and 243 people were killed. This was the first time Australia had ever been attacked by a foreign enemy. The ash-covered remnants were hit by Japanese air attacks multiple times before the end of World War II.
Darwin’s economic base was wrecked, and the federal government was reluctant to pay for the reconstruction of such a remote outpost. Downtown buildings were left as shells well into the next decade. In 1974, a giant Pacific typhoon named Cyclone Tracy made landfall near the harbor and leveled the city once again. In the years between these two obliterations, Darwin struggled to create more jobs and opportunities beyond the docks and the rail yards. Few people wanted to move there. Beer, vegetables, and clothes had to be trucked or flown in; most of the milk was powdered.
In place of a sewer system, the residents used pit toilets known as flaming furies—metal drums half sunk into the ground and in which human waste was burned out with diesel fuel in the evenings. The nightly stench of the burning toilets was known locally as la perfume. There were no operating funeral homes, and the territorial morgue had no electricity. A new employee at the morgue created a commotion one night in 1954 when he saw sweat beads forming on a corpse’s skin; he thought the body had come to life. But the “sweat” turned out to be condensation from the muggy air.
One of Darwin’s residents was a prospector named John Michael “Jack” White, who in 1949 started rummaging around some old copper shafts near a spot called Rum Jungle. The place had been named in honor of a nineteenth-century wagon crew that got bogged down in mud on its way to deliver some rum kegs to a cable station. Nervous about crocodiles in the streams, the teamsters decided to drink the rum. There had been several hundred gallons at their disposal, and the party lasted for days. Near this spot, Jack White found greenish rocks that clearly were not copper, but they gave no other hint as to their identity. Geologists in Australia had been furnished with guidebooks picturing the various expressions of uranium—carnotite, pitchblende, brannanite, coffinite, and the like—and White recognized an oxide called torbernite. Contractors redug the copper tunnels to five hundred feet and sealed off the area. The uranium went to Britain’s atomic arsenal. Jack White was rewarded with a $50,000 finder’s fee, though there were complaints in Darwin about the low amount he had been paid for such a find.
The news still created a jolt. Here at last was a source of ready cash in the Top End. It did not seem to matter that few—if any—Australian geologists knew a thing about uranium. The federal Bureau of Mineral Resources issued topographical maps, printed how-to manuals, intervened in claim disputes, and assayed samples. This was almost identical to what was happening in America at the same time: Ordinary people were encouraged to scour a desert in exchange for the possibility of a large cash reward—an odd melding of capitalistic incentive and state oversight; Wismut and Utah together again. It was what economists call a monopsony: a single buyer and a lot of sellers.
Joe Fisher showed up in the midst of this gambler’s atmosphere attached to the company United Uranium No Liability, a job he acquired through family connections. This gave him a paycheck and credibility in a time of shifting fortunes. UUNL had a reputation as a well-financed outfit, with top geologists on the payroll, and it would later go on to develop fourteen productive mines in the South Alligator Valley. But nothing was certain then. One of Fisher’s first jobs was at a bluff-side claim called El Sharana, where a huge lode of uranium had just been named for the three young daughters—Ellen, Sharon, and Anna—of the chief prospector.
Joe Fisher found a headache, however. The road to the claim turned out to be so precipitous that heavy-torque bulldozers had to winch the trucks up the bluff. The camp itself was also a maze of canvas tents connected to the highway via a rough road through a crocodile-infested river. Fisher fired the caretaker, ordered a new camp constructed, and started bulldozing a new road. Mosquitoes made black funnel clouds in the evenings, and the average daytime temperature in the summers topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The camp had a movie projector, but only two films: a drama called Westward the Women and a documentary, Erotic Art of India. The miners watched them over and over. There was nothing
else to do. “They were long, tough days,” Fisher recalled, “but there could be no turning back.”
Another problem was the airstrip, which had been foolishly oriented perpendicular to the mountainside. When the wind was wrong, the planes were forced to take off aimed straight for the cliff and then execute a hairpin turn as soon as they were aloft. This was judged too risky, even for the uranium daredevils. Fisher had just started ripping out trees for a new airstrip when an official of the Department of Civil Aviation told him the entire site was unsafe and refused to grant a license. Fisher would have no choice but to find a landing site farther away. The access road would have to be more than thirty-seven miles long and cross the twisting South Alligator River twice. The road would also pass by Coronation Hill, an equally promising strike nearby that had been discovered on the same day that Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in London.
Heavy rains pounded the area in the Wet of 1955, washing away the fill from the causeways and turning the road to muck. Fisher had to borrow two army trucks and a winch to haul uranium over the roads; the river crossings were served by a government truck with axles that could clear the water, as well as a “flying fox”—a suspended cage attached to the trees with a rope, in which men and equipment could be pulleyed across the river.
He managed to open the road and airstrip by the beginning of the next “Dry.” There was also a bonus. While flying the route one day, he did a spectrometer survey (there was always time for that) and found a radioactive patch on another mountain slope, rich in pitchblende, that produced a rainbow smear of colors on the incline. Fisher named the site Palette after the artist’s tool and ordered a corkscrewed road built up to the site to start exploiting it.
Fisher had been among the lucky ones. He had access to a real company with real money. For the less-well-connected locals in Darwin, there were only two ways to get in. You could go out into the steaming jungle and wave around a Geiger counter. Or you could buy penny shares in one of the hundreds of companies forming inside living rooms and over glasses of Tooheys Draught. The bar at the Darwin Hotel had become an informal stock exchange.
A man named Ross Annabell decided to go prospecting after he got fired from his job at the Northern Territory News. Investing didn’t excite him. “New offices were opening, new base camps being set up,” he recalled in his memoirs. “Geologists fresh from the south were racing around in Land Rovers, and prospectors were being recruited. There was a smell of money in the air.”
He soon became disheartened. Roads out of Darwin were often impassable or nonexistent. As it was in the United States, the hunting was all done on the vast reserves of unsettled government land, much of it rough and isolated. Swarms of insects crawled in a prospector’s eyes and buzzed in his ears at night. And there was the feathery red soil called bull dust, which could bog down a jeep just as badly as mud had trapped the rum-drinking teamsters of the previous century. Complained Annabell: “It gets into your hair and lungs, your clothes, your camera, into the innermost recesses of your gear (no matter how well you roll your swag), and into your eyes and into your food.” Those who lost their tempers in the bush were said to have “gone troppo,” or been driven crazy by the stultifying tropical air. A few took to blasting away with shotguns at logs floating in the creeks, believing them to be crocodiles, which sometimes they were. Alcohol, of course, was a dependable refuge. The road east of Darwin became known as the Glass Highway for the countless empty bottles of beer and whiskey tossed out of car windows.
Annabell’s tools were a pick and a shovel and a Geiger counter with a pair of headphones. He partnered with an Aboriginal named Dick, who occasionally worried out loud about whether he was inadvertently treading on sacred ground and thus potentially triggering the catastrophe that could end the world. Annabell described Dick as a “mixture of stone age and atomic age,” which, in a way, summed up the whole enterprise.
They employed a crude method for inspecting ground. Each morning, they would ride into the bush on horseback and toss lighted matches into the grass. The men would then double back after the resulting wildfires had burned away the top covering and pass their Geigers over the ash. Anything that moved the needle was pegged, which was a task in itself. Inexperienced prospectors could be easily fooled by streaks of potassium or thorium in the slate, or even the radium on their own watch dials.
It was a chimera for most, this jungle uranium, but all the false readings and dry holes did nothing to discourage the frenzy. The uranium had a peculiarly female quality to it—an allusion made time and again by the Australian wanderers who found themselves bewitched by quivering needles. One lucky finder named his mine Fleur de Lys, after an attractive woman named Lys, who worked as a cocktail waitress at the Darwin Hotel. One of Australia’s largest uranium mines would be named Mary Kathleen. Said Ross Annabell: “Uranium is an unpredictable lady, every bit as fickle as gold. That she flowers on the surface with the rich greens and yellows of secondary ores does not necessarily mean she’s there in depth. Success lies in the location of the primary ore body, which may not exist.” Those minerals may have eroded away, he said, leaving nothing but a gorgeous smear of carnotite as a tease.
For Joe Fisher, these were the headiest days of his life; he was on the trail of an exotic mineral, as his father had been; uranium was the material that would shake the Top End out of its slumber and raise it to the top echelon of Australian states. He had found the adventure of a lifetime with UUNL. His mantra, like that of many other of his contemporaries, was simple: “Wealth follows energy.”
Most of the fly-by-nights were out of business by 1960, but the established producers were reaping a rich harvest, exporting $164 million of yellowcake each year. The El Sharana mine yielded the biggest piece of solid pitchblende ever recorded—nearly one ton. The black blob was hauled to the Darwin fairgrounds and put on exhibit as a publicity stunt; newspapers across the country ran photographs. UUNL had become wealthy enough to acquire the neighboring Coronation Hill site and built a large gravity mill at El Sharana. Fisher’s wife, Eleanor, was the one chosen to push the ceremonial button setting the mill to life.
The couple was invited to dine at a banquet with Queen Elizabeth II herself when she docked the royal yacht Britannia in Darwin. After drinking three martinis to calm his nerves, Fisher took his assigned seat next to the sovereign. Over a meal of lobster and spaghetti, Queen Elizabeth turned to him and talked for thirty minutes about uranium hunting. In a note to himself scribbled immediately afterward, Fisher wrote, “Her voice is beautiful, her hands expressive. In conversation, her eyes light up and one feels a real interest is being taken in the discussion.”
He had a deeper reason to feel that way. The defense policies of Her Majesty’s government were directly responsible for his fortune. The British Atomic Energy Authority had been contracting with his company for the production of two thousand tons of uranium oxide a year. A portion of it was enriched to a level above 90 percent U-235 and placed in the core of atomic bombs.
That uranium would be returned to its home country, after a fashion, through a series of nuclear tests conducted on a southern plain called Maralinga. Seven nuclear weapons were exploded there by the British military in the 1950s, leaving radioactivity in the soil and in the lungs of Australian soldiers assigned to monitor the site. These events would come to stir popular resentment toward Great Britain, whose treatment of its antipodal cousins had been a source of tension ever since the battle of Gallipoli in 1915, when Australian troops were ordered into a hopeless attempt to capture a Turkish peninsula. Many Australians felt their newest mineral export was becoming a means for their nation to be treated, once again, as a cash box and garbage bin by the colonial power.
Joe Fisher remained undaunted. Uranium was like gold to him: the mineral that could build up Australia and make it rich among nations.
“Why should we have left it in the ground?” he said. “It is there to be used.”
The hazardous qualities of the mineral�
��either the immediate danger of alpha rays or the more abstract worry about its use in nuclear weapons—never bothered him.
“I’d sleep on a bed of uranium and wouldn’t worry a bit about it,” he told me. “You don’t need it to make bombs. Ordinary gunpowder would do the job just as well.”
But the good times were drying up. The five atomic superpowers—Great Britain, the USSR, France, China, and the United States—slowed down their crash acquisitions just as the uranium machine had been revved up to a frenzy. Yellowcake barrels began to stack up in the warehouses; companies were forced to sell their inventories at a deep discount.
A key buyer was absent. The nuclear power industry was taking a painfully long time to come online, despite the blue-sky predictions of William L. Laurence and futurists who followed his lead. Total worldwide capacity was just one gigawatt by 1960, barely enough to light one small city for eight hours a day. The United States announced it would shield its own companies from bankruptcy by enriching only the uranium that came from its own Western deserts, closing off the choicest market for the suddenly abundant mineral. Production had dropped by 40 percent by 1965, but the price kept plummeting.
This was a period of market evolution when only one thing was known to everyone: A Thing this destructive could be traded like no ordinary commodity. Only military superpowers and a few public utilities could buy it. And they were free to deal with a mélange of suppliers, ranging from energy giants such as Gulf Oil, Phillips Petroleum, and Rio Tinto Zinc to government marketing boards such as the French cooperative Uranex, the South African Nufcor, and the Canadian UCAN, which had acquired their stock from more low-level players such as Joe Fisher’s UUNL and Charlie Steen’s Utex. The contracts were long term, typically ten years. Terms and prices were dictated by national security decisions, made in secret. All of this made the uranium market about as flexible as a tree stump.
Tom Zoellner Page 23