BusinessWeek is reporting that Australia is moving to China. At the rate of a million tons a day, Australia is excavated, poured into trucks, loaded aboard barges, and floated off to the Middle Kingdom. There it is employed in the service of high-winding the national economy so that the Chinese may live like Americans. Which is their right: if Americans can live like Americans, everyone else should be able to, too. Problem is, it would require the resources of 5.3 earths for everyone to live like an American. And we only have one.
It is the iron-rich region of Pilbara that is migrating to China. “Pilbara” is the Aboriginal word for “mullet,” the fish that used to run in the mountain creeks there. That was before the native peoples were displaced by stockmen and ruffians. Now the earth itself is leaving.
The red earth here contains an estimated 24 billion tons of iron ore. In the 1970s it left in smaller quantities and returned to Australia in Toyotas and Mazdas;
now the dirt is going offshore forever, to house and transport workers in the cities of China.
While it’s a complex industry, at the basic level mining is dead-simple: Dirt is dug from the ground, loaded onto trucks, taken to trains, then put on boats. It is the scale that stuns, particularly in this operation. The trucks are two stories tall. The trains are two miles long, and they pour like rivers down the mountains to the coast, where the carrier ships await. The million tons of ore the ships carry away each day is up by 70 percent in the past five years, and most of it is bound for China.
[The ore] is loaded onto 325-yard-long bulk carriers waiting by purpose-built wharves 500 yards long. About eight of these massive ships leave every day.
Selling itself to China has allowed Australia to evade the global recession—its unemployment rate, at 5.1%, is the same as it was before the transnational money-munchers went into a swoon.
Some Australians, however, wonder whether, in the words of one Tony Wiltshire, the mining people are “just here to make a buck and go, or build something sustainable? The question is whether we’re going to have mines with towns, or towns with mines.”
That’s a question easily answered. I lived in a mining town for 15 years. Except it’s not a town anymore. It died, slowly, long before I moved there, after the mines played out. It has always been thus, for mining towns. My “town,” when I lived in it, was no longer a town—it was, rather, a “ghost town.” Once the earth is all used up, the Pilbara will go ghostly, too.
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