Mining Towns: Making a Living, Making a Life

313 Pages·2012·5.89 MB·English

by  Erik Eklund

M i n i n g
T o w n s
Erik Eklund grew up in Wollongong and studied at the university
of Sydney. He was appointed to the university of newcastle in 1994,
where, among other things, he was involved in a project to locate
the convict coal mines that lay beneath the city. in 2001 Erik was
a recipient of the Australian Academy of Humanities Travelling Fel-
lowship to support the writing of Steel Town: The making and breaking of
Port Kembla. That same year he held a visiting appointment at George-
town university in Washington dC. in 2003 Steel Town was awarded
the nSW Premier’s History Prize. in 2005 Erik was a Visiting Fellow at
the Humanities research Centre, Anu. He joined Monash university
in 2008.
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M i n i n g
T o w n s
M a k i n g a l i v i n g , M a k i n g a l i f e
e r i k e k l u n d
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A UNSW Press book
Published by
newSouth Publishing
university of new South Wales Press ltd
university of new South Wales
Sydney nSW 2052
AuSTrAliA
newsouthpublishing.com
© Erik Eklund 2012
First published 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose
of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the
Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without
written permission. inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.
national library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Author: Eklund, Erik Carl.
Title: Mining towns: making a living, making a life/Erik Eklund.
iSBn: 978 174223 352 9 (pbk)
iSBn: 978 174224 111 1 (epub)
iSBn: 978 174224 368 9 (kindle)
iSBn: 978 174224 598 0 (pdf)
notes: includes bibliographical references and index.
Subjects: Mineral industries – Australia – Social aspects.
Miners – dwellings – Australia.
Cities and towns – Australia.
dewey number: 307.7660994
Design Josephine Pajor-Markus
Cover ‘Miners fnishing a shift at Western Mining Corporation’s Silver lake shaft at kambalda in
south-east Western Australia, 28 March 1969’. nlA. it has not been possible to trace the names
of these men.
Printer Griffn
This book is printed on paper using fbre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed
forests.
The author plans to donate royalties from this book to the royal Flying doctor Service, which
is active in all the regions covered in this book. See <www.fyingdoctor.org.au>.
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Contents
introduction 1
1 The global and national context 9
2 Broken Hill: icon of working-class culture 35
3 Mount Morgan: in the thrall of modernity 69
4 Queenstown: ‘They’ve got to come here and they’ve got to
learn about it’ 105
5 Port Pirie: ‘Essentially hard and practical’ 135
6 Mount isa: normalising outback suburbia 173
7 kambalda: Modernity, environment and experience 205
Postscript 233
Appendix: The oral history component 240
notes 243
Bibliography 273
Acknowledgments 289
index 291
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introduction
Darwin
imagine a map of Australia with the capital cities marked in bold
and the regional cities in smaller print. This kind of map refects a
hierarchy which many histories have followed. Political, social and
economic histories focus on the centres of power and commerce –
NORTHERN TERRITORY Mt Isa Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra. Beliefs about value and importance
shape all too clearly the ‘where’ and the ‘who’ of the Australian histori-
QUEENSLAND
cal record. Moving beyond a city-centric view of history, and changing
Mt Morgan
the starting point for analysis, reveals different aspects of the Austral-
WESTERN AUSTRALIA ian experience. rather than heading to the familiar east coast with
SOUTH AUSTRALIA Brisbane its ever-expanding conurbations, we will look elsewhere. This book
will turn that hierarchy on its head, and we will fnd that ‘elsewhere’
is actually somewhere: the places, communities, and lives beyond the
Kambalda Broken Hill
Port Pirie ‘Big Smoke’.
NEW SOUTH WALES
Perth Elizabeth Firth was born in Broken Hill in 1933. She is a busy,
Adelaide Canberra Sydney socially engaged woman who is proud of her town and of her mother,
VICTORIA a pioneering feminist in the Broken Hill branch of the labor Party.
Melbourne Her father was born in Broken Hill of Victorian parents. Her mother
came to Broken Hill from the copper mining town of kadina in South
Australia. Her father worked underground at the Zinc Corporation
Queenstown TASMANIA
as a timberman, and before marriage her mother worked at a local
Hobart
retailer, J.C. Goodharts. Asked about her earliest memories, she recalls
an uncle who was injured at the mines:
He had a motor car and he used to take me all over the place. i was
his little girl because he didn’t have any children. And i remember
going to the pay offce at the Zinc Corporation every fortnight
Map of Australia showing the six towns covered in this book with him to pick up his workers compensation pay. And there
and the capital cities was tuppence in the pay envelope and the tuppence was mine …
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introduction
Darwin
imagine a map of Australia with the capital cities marked in bold
and the regional cities in smaller print. This kind of map refects a
hierarchy which many histories have followed. Political, social and
economic histories focus on the centres of power and commerce –
NORTHERN TERRITORY Mt Isa Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra. Beliefs about value and importance
shape all too clearly the ‘where’ and the ‘who’ of the Australian histori-
QUEENSLAND
cal record. Moving beyond a city-centric view of history, and changing
Mt Morgan
the starting point for analysis, reveals different aspects of the Austral-
WESTERN AUSTRALIA ian experience. rather than heading to the familiar east coast with
SOUTH AUSTRALIA Brisbane its ever-expanding conurbations, we will look elsewhere. This book
will turn that hierarchy on its head, and we will fnd that ‘elsewhere’
is actually somewhere: the places, communities, and lives beyond the
Kambalda Broken Hill
Port Pirie ‘Big Smoke’.
NEW SOUTH WALES
Perth Elizabeth Firth was born in Broken Hill in 1933. She is a busy,
Adelaide Canberra Sydney socially engaged woman who is proud of her town and of her mother,
VICTORIA a pioneering feminist in the Broken Hill branch of the labor Party.
Melbourne Her father was born in Broken Hill of Victorian parents. Her mother
came to Broken Hill from the copper mining town of kadina in South
Australia. Her father worked underground at the Zinc Corporation
Queenstown TASMANIA
as a timberman, and before marriage her mother worked at a local
Hobart
retailer, J.C. Goodharts. Asked about her earliest memories, she recalls
an uncle who was injured at the mines:
He had a motor car and he used to take me all over the place. i was
his little girl because he didn’t have any children. And i remember
going to the pay offce at the Zinc Corporation every fortnight
with him to pick up his workers compensation pay. And there
was tuppence in the pay envelope and the tuppence was mine …
1
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Mining Towns
I think I was about th r e e when I re m e m b e r t h a t and I re m e m b e r a
1
f ew outings we used to hav e .
I n 19 7 5 , on the othe r side of th e continent, iW l l Manos and his fa mil y
a r rive d in K am b a l d a , on the gold� e l ds south of K a lgoorlie. His fa mily
ha d moved t h e r e f rom D a rwin, via Pe r t h . His grandpa r ents were living
in K am b a l d a East. iW l l was �ve when the y ar rive d : ‘Thirt y - � v e ye a rs
la t e r my fa mily ar e stil in K am b a l d a and we love th e pl a c e to dea t h
2
and we ce r t ainly ca l l K a m b a l d a home. ’
F rom th e old mining town of Broken Hil in far western N ew Sout h
a l esW to the nicke l mining town of K am b a l d a in W este rn Austr a lia ,
t h ese two stories are a tiny sele c tion of many individu a l stories fro m
be yond th e ‘Big Smoke’ .
The inspira tion for this book comes from over 30 de t aile d inter -
views, and nume rous othe r informa l discussions, with people fro m
industrial and mining towns in regional Austr a lia. These inter views ,
va ried though th e y ar e , ha v e comon the m es: migration and move-
m ent, and pl a c e -spe ci�c identi. ty The book re v e a ls evocative m e mories
of pl a c e , compl e m ente d and counter b a l ance d by stories of movem ent ,
3
migration and connection with othe r p l a c es. These othe r p l a c es coul d
b e mining towns, ports, or pl a c es of origin for migrants. The ca pita l
cities are re l e v ant too, bec a use while th e y ar e not the focus of this
work, th e y pl a y an important role as sites of �nancial and politica l
pow. er B e yond th e m , comunities ha v e de v e lope d de e p links to thei r
locali, ty b u t t h ese towns are a lso connect e d to wider r egional, nationa l
and international pa t t e rns.

This book exa mines the history of six Austr a lian towns which ra r e l y
�gure in national histories or national discourse: Broken Hil ( N ew
South al esW ) , Mount Morgan (Qu e ensland), Qu e enstown (Tasma-
nia), Port Pirie (South Austr a lia) , Mount I sa (Q u e ensland) and K a m -
b a l d a es(W t e rn Austr a lia) . I hope it encourages us to think anew about
th ese pl a c es, and to qu estion a city - c entric national histo. ry I t e x p lores
2
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introduction
another way of framing our past – as a network of place-based histo-
ries and experiences criss-crossing the continent. The book is both
a detailed engagement with the specifc histories of six towns and a
contribution to a more geographically inclusive national history.
Three of the towns were a product of the 1880s and all were metal
mining sites. Broken Hill in far western new South Wales mined silver,
lead and zinc from 1883 and became one of the richest mining felds in
the world, the progenitor of major Australian companies. Queenstown
grew in the gold, copper and iron mining felds in and around Mount
lyell, near the west coast of Tasmania. Gold mining began in this area
in 1881 and the town of Queenstown rose from the ashes of a major
fre which burnt out a prior settlement, Penghana, in 1896. Mount
Morgan was a gold (and later gold and copper) mining town in Central
Queensland which began production in 1883. By the 1890s, all three
of these mines were operations on a scale that was unprecedented in
Australia.
in contrast to the inland metal mining towns of the 1880s and
1890s, Port Pirie is near the northern end of South Australia’s Spencer
Gulf, and is not, in fact, a mining town. A trading port which frst
appeared in the 1870s, by the 1890s Port Pirie had an important eco-
nomic link with Broken Hill, with the establishment of smelters treat-
ing Broken Hill ore. Port Pirie reveals important connections between
the mining and industrial sectors, as the products and profts of mining
reached out to affect other places and industries.
Finally, there are two 20th century towns. Mount isa, in north-
western Queensland, began as a silver and lead mine in 1923, and
later developed a large smelting and copper mining operation. The
town grew around the mine site and by 1930 on-site industrialisation,
including a large lead smelter, was in place. kambalda, on the eastern
goldfelds of Western Australia, had a short life as a gold mining town
from the end of the 19th century. it reappeared in 1966, becoming a
signifcant nickel producer and the site of a major modern company-
designed town.
These towns cover every state in Australia except Victoria, and
3
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