Day 51-52 Out of the Kimberley, Into the Pilbara

Mon-Tues, 19-20 July 2021

A reader has requested a map of Australia with our route drawn on it. This is rough (I’ll improve on it when we get home), but here it is:

We’ve planned a five-day relay to return home, 2580 kms from Derby in the far northwest to our home in Myalup in the southwest, roughly 500 kms per day. Way more time than we’re used to sitting in a car.

It opens up time for reflection. On the multi-faceted character of Australia, on travel, on home, time, relationships, aging. Australia is a beautiful country, but also very homogenous compared to countries similar in size, such as the USA. Nearly everywhere you go, save for green, forested places in the southwest and southeast, you meet a lot of scrub, red rock, red dust, red earth. They don’t call it a sunburnt country for nothing. For all its many wonders, the monotony of the landscape can also get boring.

Travelling from Derby to our first camp spot about 250 kms south of Broome is a good example. Flat, bland landscape, tunnels of flowering acacia running for miles along the highway.

Port Hedland is the hub of Australia’s massive mining industry. Not a large town in terms of population, but everything is industrial in size and character. The harbour, with its dozen or so ships hanging out just offshore waiting to be called in for their cargo, dominates the town centre, a mere strip of two streets of shabby shops along the foreshore. Every second person wears reflective orange or yellow work clothes and nearly every car is a white ute, also with reflective stripes and a dingy orange flag flopping around on a pole high above the cab.

The Great Northern Highway is the main thoroughfare between north and south in Western Australia, and it vies for two major industries: mining and tourism. Judging from the ratio of road trains to tourists it looks like the miners are winning. For every dozen road trains – industrial trucks with three, four, sometimes five cars – there is one caravan- or trailer-toting traveller, often stuck between the convoy of trucks. It’s not easy to pass a truck measuring over 50 metres in length.

The noise of these mega-trains is phenomenal, as we discover the first night we camp in a shady little hub just off the highway. The sound of an approaching then receding truck can last for a minute or longer, filling the airspace of the otherwise silent bush with prodigious noise. North of Port Hedland, things quiet down soon after sundown. South of Port Hedland -- the hub of the Pilbara's mining operations -- where we camp in a lovely valley of slendour white gum trees nominated to be a 24-hour rest stop, it doesn’t quieten down. Most mines run 24/7 so most trucks do too, shifting their cargo from the mines to the port all through the day and night. It is a swirling cacophony of sound, broken only occasionally by a reprieve of calm, the gentle chorus of crickets rising until the next crescendo of truck traffic overpowers them.

Mining in Australia is a century-old industry that, especially in the last 20 years, has brought the country from a modest second-cousin status to a major economic force on the world stage. China is largely built on Australia’s iron ore. Most Australians are proud of this. Even if they’re not, or if they don’t think about it much, most Australians are happy with the wealth it brings. In the 30+ years I’ve been here, Australia has grown from a backwater to a thriving, shining example of modern affluence and prosperity.

Yet the hegemony of the mining industry in Australia drowns out any resistance to or criticism of it. The reality of mining’s impact is complex and difficult to articulate in a culture where wealth and economic rationalism prevail over other values -- such as the environment, the protection on flora and fauna, aesthetics – including our access to silence, untrammelled landscapes, and deep dark skies -- beauty, spirit, indigenous wisdom and culture, all of which have taken a bashing from the unabated expansion of mines in this country. Little of that gets much attention, let alone tolerance, as a legitimate platform for opposition. 

Indigenous issues are dealt with by corralling them into the predominant cultural mindset – we’ll give you jobs in exchange for access to (rape and ravage) your traditional lands. Environmental issues are dealt with by hiring a team of geologists and environmental scientists whose job it is to measure the impact of mining operations on the land, but which doesn’t take into consideration the broader issues of aesthetic impacts or ethical issues around the displacement of natural habitats. All the collected data gets sorted and slotted and reported to give the illusion that some action is being taken to waylay the serious impacts of the industry on climate change. But given its exponential growth and the hundreds of diesel-burning cars, trucks, trains, ships, railways and roadworks that service the industry – let alone the subsidiary industries that benefit from mining -- it’s hard to imagine its carbon footprint is being reigned in.

We read recently that a major “green energy” project is being planned for Australia’s south coast. Fifteen thousand square miles of the Nullarbor Plain, much of it native title land, will be ceded to the development of a hydrogen-producing plant, which in turn will be powered by massive green energy farms consisting of solar panels and windmills. It’s expected to produce enough energy to fuel a new fleet of hydrogen-burning vehicles which will remake the face of the mining industry in Australia, and resolve the issues related to carbon emissions. In fact, the energy produced will be so great, that we’ll be able to export it to other countries, and still have enough left over to broaden our industrial platform: instead of shipping raw minerals overseas we can build our own factories and processing plants here – a double win for the economy and a triple win for the environment.

And what of the silence?

I wake in the middle of the night, startled by the silence. For a long drawn-out breath, the road rumble has gone quiet, the stillness of the night pulsing in my ears as it has for many of the places we’ve camped throughout this trip. I can't help but wonder how long it will last.