178 CRA (Now Rio Tinto) See current profile on Rio Tinto.
See also - the Kintyreand Rum Jungle pages and
the Mary Kathleen, RTZ, Rossing and Rio Algom dossiers.It is hardly feasible to condense the history of CRA into less than a major book. For this is the largest company within the RTZ group - itself the largest mining conglomerate in the world and, in 1989, it provided nearly a quarter of RTZ's profits (1). Measured by market capitalisation, CRA comes sixth among the world's top ten mining corporations (2).
RTZ may be the world's most criticised miner, but CRA is more responsible than any other of its units for the desecration of indigenous land and culture. For more than a decade, Rossing Uranium may have flagrantly violated international (UN) law, but Comalco (CRA 67%) has, for far longer, successfully cajoled, deceived and browbeaten legislators over a whole continent. Rio Algom may have been a bigger and more efficient producer of uranium, but CRA could be producing yellowcake long after Rio Algom's mines have closed. RTZ's smelting plants may have aroused more ire than CRA's - yet the Australian operations are bigger and more important. The parent company may be the most diversified mining company in the world (3), but CRA runs a close second.
Apart from the operations detailed in this entry CRA in the last few years has held (or still holds):
Dampier Salt - Australia's biggest producer of salt, and the world's second largest solar salt producer (4), 65% owned by CRA (5) (along with Marubeni, an old friend of both CRA and RTZ).
18% of Metal Manufacturers, Australia's leading cable group which is controlled by BICC, the British company rumoured in 1988 to be the subject of a possible take-over bid by RTZ (6).
Australia's leading experimenter in living cell transformation, so-called "biotechnology". Biotechnology Australia Pty Ltd was formed in 1977; its first commercial product, Neogard, a pig vaccine, was released for sale in 1985 (4). CRA sold 50% of Biotechnology in 1989 to Hoechst AG of West Germany (5).
90% of Capital Casting, a foundry-based business in Arizona USA, purchased in 1977 (7).
A 19.9% interest in the offshore North Herald and South Pepper petroleum prospect in Western Australia (8).
A joint venture with Mitsubishi, formed in 1985, to explore the Oaklands coal deposit in the Riverina district of New South Wales (NSW) (9).
A 1987 lease on large lead-zinc deposits in the north-west of Western Australia (WA), 150 km south of the town of Broome at a depth of more than 1000 metres (10).
The Peak gold prospect, near Cobar, NSW, containing around 4.5 million tonnes of gold and other metals at fairly high grade (11).
A sophisticated research centre in Cockle Creek, NSW, and the intention to construct another one in Perth, WA (8).
A joint venture with Battle Mountain Gold Co (USA) (which is the main partner with RTZ in the Lihir Island gold prospect in Papua New Guinea) (12) in a precious metals project in Kalimantan (Borneo) Indonesia. CRA is the major partner and operator (60%) (13).
Conzinc Asia Holdings, which carried out dredging for tin in Malaysia and manufactures aluminium products (5, 14). This was sold in 1989. CRA is Australia's most important mining company: depending on how its operations and investments are evaluated, it can also be accounted Australia's second or third largest privately-owned corporation. Its major shareholder, RTZ, holds 49%: Australian public investors hold only 40% of the share capital between them (15).
Until the mid-'eighties, CRA was returning mixed, and often poor, results from its worldwide operations (16). But a decision taken to dispose of assets "not essential to the core of its business" (17) was beginning to yield results by the second half of the decade. By 1987, it had sold its timber and Melbourne property interests, and put its Forrest Gold mines and prospects in Western Australia on the market (18). In early 1988, the new company chair, John Uhrig, was telling the annual general meeting of CRA in Melbourne that, thanks to high productivity at its major mines, cash gained through disposals and the favourable exchange rate (19), CRA was now "cashed up" and ready either for a major one billion dollar acquisition (20) or a number of smaller ones (21).
1988 was a record year for the company (22) (profits were up nearly 100% on 1987's). Borrowings went down; so did corporate taxation in New Zealand and Australia, and there were "unusual" gains through a "restatement" of net future tax liabilities at lower rates (23).
It now cast around in earnest for new ventures: not in "downstream" activities, or further diversification, however. Like its parent RTZ, which had just acquired most of BP's mineral interests, it was interested in mining. Discussions about merging with two Australian coal and aluminium companies did not prove fruitful (24), but CRA was very interested in the possibility of acquiring Consolidated Goldfields' 48% stake in Renison Goldfields - should it be marketed. The company also undoubtedly held talks with RTZ about taking-over the London parent's 49% stake in the Roxby Downs uranium-copper mine (25).
In September 1989, BP withdrew its offer of the Roxby Downs share to RTZ, after Western Mining took legal action to halt the sale. However, BP Australia apparently did not prevent a later sale (409).
CRA's origins go back to the beginning of this century. The connections between the Anglo-Australian commercial elite behind the Consolidated Zinc operations, and the mining and banking interests within the Rio Tinto company, also stretch back considerably further than the Conzinc-Rio Tinto merger effected in 1962 (27), out of which came today's Rio Tinto-Zinc Corporation (RTZ). For example, in 1954 Rio Tinto acquired control of Mary Kathleen Uranium (MKU) (28) and, within the next six years, was zealously evaluating a range of Australian deposits (29).
RTZ's master plan, the brainchild of Rio Tinto's Val Duncan, honed by his colleagues Mark Turner and Roy Wright, was to "create a Rio Tinto company in each of the principal mining countries, which in turn would control a series of operations within its own territory" (30). From the start, operations and management would "as far as possible" be local, and "local participation in the equity of the overseas companies was ... essential" (30). But each regional operation would be fully backed by, and identified with, the interests of the RTZ Group in London: "... there would always be ... agreement on the aims of the individual companies and the Group as a whole" (30).
Notwithstanding the reluctant reduction of the parent company's equity in CRA to less than 50% nearly fifteen years later, the strategy laid down in 1960-62 has been relentlessly pursued ever since. CRA has always served the interests of RTZ. Or rather, as the most important and extensive mining company within the Group, CRA's investment decisions and areas of operation have usually meshed-in perfectly with those of the parent. Examples of this are numerous: the opening-up of the Weipa bauxite deposits in Cape York, Queensland, and establishment of Comalco (see below); CRA and MKU's participation in the uranium cartel; the expansion of the Hamersley and Broken Hill heavy metal fields; the opening of the Argyle diamond mine and the subsequent decision to market most of its output through the Anglo-American/De Beers Central Selling Organisation (CSO) of South Africa; carving out the Bougainville mine as an Asian-Pacific copper producer, ensuring the Group's continued dominance in world markets.
Certainly, it has not always been an easy relationship: it is sometimes possible to detect a conflict between CRA management or executives on their home ground, and the partners in London. When CRA's chief architect, Sir Roderick Carnegie, finally left the company in 1986, handing over to John Uhrig as non-executive chair, and John Ralph as managing director (31), it was speculated that he had argued with RTZ. Carnegie had wanted CRA to bid for Australia's biggest company, BHP, and Big Daddy of St. James's Square had opposed it. While Carnegie's resignation "stunned the local community", it came as no surprise to colleagues, reported the Financial Times- which also asserted that Carnegie had been the main force behind moves to reduce RTZ's equity in CRA (32).
Nor have CRA's "downstream" activities, and its expansion overseas, necessarily served RTZ's best interests. Would the parent company have flirted so closely with Krupp and Kloeckner Werke in the 1980s for example? Nonetheless, CRA (more recently its wholly-owned subsidiary CRA Exploration [CRAE]) has more tenements under exploration than any other Australian mining company; its presence in key regional countries with relatively unexploited resources (such as Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Malaysia, China) must be the envy of many Australians. Such unrivalled spread of investment and expertise has served RTZ well in its own strategy of bringing markets and mines closer together (above all in the case of Japan) (33), reducing labour, production and environmental costs, and exploiting new deposits.
The doyens of 6 St James's Square (RTZ's suitably anonymous London headquarters) have consistently denied this symbiosis between the Group and its most important subsidiary. But this is not a consistent position. With a certain smugness (or studied carelessness?) RTZ sometimes lets it be publicly known that it still holds the reins. After RTZ's holdings in CRA had fallen below 49%, the London Financial Weekly commented revealingly: "When CRA had troubles with industrial action at Broken Hill [in 1986] there is no question that the men from London were very much instrumental in settling the dispute. If problems with the overseas investments do arise, they are very often matched by RTZ's cultivated diplomatic skills overseas ... Sir Alistair disagrees that the London office may at times be too far removed from operations to exercise tight control" (35).
In the late 'eighties many people were disturbed at the ruthless zeal being employed by CRA, in order to gain access to valuable uranium deposits in the Rudall River National Park (WA) (see below). It is scarcely conceivable that the decision to try and bring this project into production was taken by CRA alone. All the company's uranium production to date has served the marketing needs of RTZ. When it was convenient to RTZ's grand plan to close MKU uranium in 1963 (despite loud protests from Australia), then it was closed.
"Australianisation" is something which CRA has ostensibly been carrying out for some years. In 1979, the Prime Minister issued a call for majority ownership of the country's natural resources to be in domestic hands (36), although, a year earlier, the government made it clear that this should not deter foreign investment (37). It took another seven years before the company complied. Various share placements and rights issues had effectively brought RTZ's equity down to just over half by the mid-'eighties. For example, CRA's increase of its stake in Hamersley Iron Ore Co in 1981, and a share-placement to Showa Denko of Japan and another company, reduced its interest from 52.9% to 52.3% in 1985 (38). It was not until late 1986, by selling 16.38 million CRA shares to Australian Mutual Provident (AMP) at A$7.50 a share, that RTZ's holding then fell to 49% (36). Even so, within a few weeks, the London company was taking up its full entitlement on a 1:8 CRA share rights issue, designed to raise capital for expansions at Tarong, Blair Athol, and the Argyle diamond mines (39). Nor was naturalisation a major inconvenience to RTZ: a large part of CRA's debt was, at a stroke, removed from RTZ's balance sheet (36, 40), and the London Group now paid less for depreciation of its reserves (36) (because of differences between British and Australian accounting systems). Even before the pressure to "naturalise" became too much to bear, CRA and RTZ learned that this could be a strategy not to diminish, but actually increase control over domestic resources, for both their benefits. This would be by taking-over existing Australian-run enterprises (33) and offering CRA shares in exchange for shares in the Australian companies. "Naturalisation", as Ritchie Howitt commented in his incisive 1981 analysis of CRA (33), is "... one of a series of integrated corporate strategies aimed at diversifying CRA's resource base; increasing its political, economic and industrial power; and improving both its immediate and long-term profit prospects".
In 1977, CRA bid for control of two Australian companies with ownership of highly promising coal fields - AAR (Australian Associated Resources, which discovered the Hail Creek coalfield in Queensland) and Coal and Allied Industries (CAIL) (41). When the Australian Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB) stepped in to halt the AAR take-over bid, CRA embarked on a media and letter-writing campaign, using threats and blackmail "aimed at undermining the Government's politically stable image within a week" (33). As political columnist Brian Toohey commented at the time: "... CRA has usually gone to great pains to present a public image of the good, well-mannered corporate citizen ... its recent take-over attempts, however, present a picture much more of the iron fist than the velvet glove" (408).
CRA didn't proceed with its vilification campaign, and it didn't secure AAR. But it did win, with Howard Smith, control of CAIL. It had to apologise to the Melbourne Stock Exchange for failing to inform them of the bid, and it came in for damning criticism from the press. In the Australian Financial Review, one journalist accused the company of "[breaking] the spirit of the law of the land, and on the face of it, the actual words of the law...in terms of corporate behaviour it could probably be dismissed by saying that all CRA has done is commit a traffic offense. It has treated the law in a technical way, knowing that if it is prosecuted and found guilty, it can afford to pay the fine" (43). After a temporary freeze, the bid was allowed to proceed...but nor before it was discovered that the chair of the FIRB, Sir William Pettingill, was himself a director of both Howard Smith and CRA! (44).
The only other occasion on which the government has rebuffed CRA's attempts at a takeover came when CRA (i.e. RTZ) bid for control of the Nabarlek uranium project in the Northern Territory (NT) in the early 1980s.
"Don't CRAp on our land!" was the demand made by the Aboriginal Information Centre (AMIC) on car bumper stickers produced in 1981, and distributed throughout Australia. The slogan neatly encapsulates the reality: CRA has been more responsible for encroachment on the land of Australia's original owners and the implicit denial of their land rights, than any other mining company. In the context of RTZ's worldwide operations, its Australian subsidiary stands uniquely indicted. No less than ten Aboriginal delegates, representing several major Aboriginal organizations (Aboriginal Mining Information Centre, North Queensland Land Council, Kimberley Land Council, South Eastern Land Council, Western Desert Land Council and the National Federation of Land Councils), have attended RTZ annual general meetings over the past decade,to focus international attention on CRA's activities and plans (45). CRA and Aborigines
In 1978, the first ever Aboriginal delegation to leave Australia and speak out publicly against the effects of mining, came to Britain with a brief to address RTZ about its subsidiaries' operations (see below). At the time, the US mining conglomerate, AMAX, was being attacked by Aboriginal people, trade unionists, Australian Labor Party (ALP) members, and others, for its desecration of a sacred site on the Noonkanbah pastoral station. However, CRA had itself smashed very sacred ceremonial boards at Noonkabah, and it posed a greater long-term threat than Amax, in its search for diamonds and uranium (46). The Yungngora community in Noonkanbah failed to prevent CRA from prospecting - though, out of 98 claims pegged at this time (47), only three were approved, and those were made conditional on a site survey (48). (The warden responsible for approving claims commented that Aboriginal fears were justified: "We continue to do things to the Aborigines, rather than with them") (49). Once it had proved up the Argyle diamond deposit, CRA appeared not to be so interested in Noonkanbah.
CRA was also the first mining company in Australia against which the major land councils called a boycott, for its violation of Aboriginal land - specifically at Lake Argyle, but also at Noonkanbah (46, 50).
Yet, it was Comalco (67% owned by CRA) which promoted the "Pitjantjatjara" (sometimes known as the "Comalco") model, for negotiations between mining companies and Aboriginal people, whereby a land council or community, having received detailed prospecting plans and company intentions, identifies areas in which the company may work: not only for mining, but drilling, laying seismic lines, constructing roads, water bores and camps (51). There has been justified criticism of the "model" - mainly because it concedes the right of companies to prospect and mine in situations where land rights and a mining veto have not been granted: hence, it can increase the sense of powerlessness among Aboriginal people (52, 85).
Nonetheless, it was a marked improvement on the situation prevailing through most of Australia in the 1970s and early 1980s - let alone that which characterised Comalco's own operations in Cape York province, some forty years ago.
Is it possible then, that the leopard can change its spots? Or is it more a case of the chameleon adjusting its colours to suit differing terrain? All the evidence suggests the latter. Where CRA (or Comalco) has been confronted with strong, united, Aboriginal opposition to its intentions, it will at least make a pretence at negotiations, or its protestations of innocence will be loud and clear. (No sacred sites or sacred objects will be damaged, declared Sir Roderick Carnegie at RTZ's 1981 AGM) (53). And, where the community lays down reasonable but unpalatable conditions, CRA- rather than practising deceit or force majeure - may withdraw. It did so from Oombulgurri in 1980, after the community insisted on: recognition of the Kimberley Land Council; at least three months notice of intended activities; negotiated compensation, proper training and employment; protection of sacred sites and improvement to community facilities (46, 54). But then, only the previous year, CRA had confirmed discovery of potentially the world's largest kimberlite pipe outside of South Africa, at Lake Argyle: for the time being, Oombulgurri's diamonds were not a priority (55). What CRA did to the people and land around Lake Argyle, it would undoubtedly have been prepared to do to the Forrest River people at Oombulgurri, had commercial considerations warranted. Indeed, just after CRA was beating a graceful retreat from Oombulgurri, it entered a traditional Aboriginal gathering ground at Christmas Creek and, without waiting for a sacred site survey to be completed, plunged a drill directly into a major sacred place (tjilla) called Kurungal (56).
The true face of CRA is not, then, to be judged by isolated acts of generosity (drilling for water in a parched desert community, or subsidising a Toyota), or minimal compliance with Aboriginal demands (repairing dilapidated housing at Weipa, on Cape York, in the 1970s, or supplying survey maps which are calculated to confuse as much as they enlighten). CRA is to be judged by the overall impact of the company's operations on Aboriginal communities, and its secretly-expressed intentions towards Aboriginal land and land rights.
CRA has long been a key member of the Australian Mining Industry Council (AMIC - not to be confused with the Aboriginal Mining Information Centre, sometimes known as AMICUS! by the Aboriginal people, to distinguish it from AMIC-THEM!). Although leading CRA personnel have not played such a high-profile role within the AMIC, as for example Hugh Morgan of Western Mining Corporation, it has distributed many of its self-justificatory pamphlets through AMIC (46); sponsored free booklets published by AMIC for children and, along with other AMIC members, made large contributions towards the eventual defeat of the pro-land rights Whitlam administration in 1975. There is no doubt that CRA's commercial priorities and those of AMIC - especially in the mid-1980s when land rights raised their threatening head - have been virtually synonymous.
On two occasions in the last fourteen years, the veil over CRA's "hidden agenda" for Aboriginal people has been pulled away. On both occasions the revelations were made by employees who were incensed at the gulf between the company's public declarations and its secret intent. In 1978, a Memorandum fell into the hands of CIMRA (Colonialism and Indigenous Minorities Research/Action), summarising mineral deposits discovered by CRAE on 39 Aboriginal reserves - some of which had clearly been under scrutiny for a considerable time. Among the areas listed as "top priority" for future programmes were Arnhemland, Groote Elandt and Forrest River. Daly River, in the NT, was listed as having "potential for diamonds, copper, lead, zinc and uranium". Among the reserves listed in Group 2 - "only marginally below those in Group 1" - were the West Kimberley Reserves (potentially diamondiferous) and Yuendumu. "Low mineral potential" was recorded for Jigalong Reserve in Western Australia (WA), Cundeelee (WA) among others, and "little or no mineral" potential was assessed for eleven other reserves, including Beagle Bay (WA), Aurukun-Mitchell River in Queensland (QLD) (only bauxite was considered prospective in this region), the Yalata Reserve (WA) and Mornington Island (QLD) (57). The memorandum had been compiled by Harry Evans in 1976 (the CRA geologist who "discovered" the Weipa bauxite deposits) and was, in fact, leaked to the Melbourne Age the following year (58). But it was not until it was publicised at the RTZ annual general meeting in 1978, that its full import was appreciated.
CIMRA, together with the major British overseas aid charity War on Want, and supported by Survival International and Greenpeace (London), issued a press release accusing CRA of deliberately focussing on remaining Aboriginal lands as soft targets (59). The furore caused by the revelation (60) forced RTZ's chair, Mark Turner, to send his vice-chair, Lord Shackleton, to Australia, ostensibly to check the allegations. In fact, Shackleton did not meet any major Aboriginal leaders during his brief visit, spent less than an hour at the Weipa reserve, and did not talk to any Australian press (61) . RTZ also responded angrily to an Open Letter addressed to Turner by War on Want and CIMRA, accusing Comalco of forcing Aborigines off reserves and settlements, burning their homes, destroying their culture, and showing "brutal unconcern" in the face of consequent suffering (59). It sent a solicitor's letter threatening a libel action if the accusations were repeated (62): War on Want did not do so, but CIMRA continued to assert the truth of its case.
Apologists for the mining companies would argue that a Memorandum of this kind is nothing to write home about (certainly nothing to tell the press about): it is merely routine. Such cynical acceptance of the "right" of mining companies to walk onto Aboriginal land, explore and drill without consent from its owners, then blithely presume they will be able to proceed to mining when it suits their interests, should appal us just as much as a public relations exercise designed at weakening land rights campaigns of specific communities.
It was such an exercise which comprised part of a second covert action indulged in by CRA. By 1980, Greg Walker, the public affairs manager for Ashton JV/Kimberley Diamond Mines (forerunner of the Argyle Diamond Mines JV and then, as now, controlled by CRA) had commissioned two public relations companies to suggest how CRA could lobby against the setting-up of a diamond cutting industry in Australia (which would undercut arrangements it had made with Anglo-American/De Beers), and "sustain the Argyle Agreement with the Glen Hill Aboriginal community and isolat[e] this agreement from the general debate on Aboriginal land rights while encouraging community acceptance of the company's policy towards its Aboriginal neighbours". What this meant, quite simply, was that CRA wanted a public relations campaign which would convince the public that it was supporting Aboriginal self-determination while actually doing the opposite. The Glen Hill "agreement" had been signed with a selected group of Aborigines, in order not to have to deal with the demands of the whole community (see below).
The company chosen for this purpose was Eric White Associates, the Australian subsidiary of the world's biggest public relations firm, Hill and Knowlton - "like Ashton Joint Venture, it was a hawk" (63). CRA's own public relations company, International Public Relations Pty (IPR), had its submission rejected (46), because it argued for securing a larger share of revenue for Aboriginal people (63). Eric White, on the other hand, was broadly in tune with Ashton JV objectives. Greg Walker urged acceptance of the White proposal - and so the world's biggest public relations company was duly brought in to White-wash Australia's biggest threat to the Aboriginal people of the Kimberleys (63). The saving in royalties to Ashton JV was promised to be "substantially greater than the proposed expenditure on the company's public relations programme next year" (3, 46, 64).
Seven years later, it was CRA's activities in the western desert which gave rise to most anxiety among Aboriginal communities (see below). The Martu people have good reason to be disquieted. Several of their community visited the Argyle diamond mine, in 1988, to see what they might be letting themselves in for, and they returned absolutely determined to stop mining (that of CRA in particular) on their traditional lands.
Even before then, like almost every other Aboriginal community throughout Australia, they had heard about Weipa and Mapoon in Cape York province, Queensland: site of the world's largest open-cast bauxite mine.
These two places have become synonymous with the devastation and social breakdown caused by mining. In a lengthy report, in 1976, Melbourne Age reporter David Broadbent delivered one of the most powerful attacks on the human effects of mining ever made, after a visit to Cape York. "If men ever establish a base on the barren surface of Mars," he wrote, "it will look like Weipa". By then Comalco had been mining at Weipa for a decade - the result, declared Broadbent, was "acres of dead craters unrelieved by a single growing thing". The conditions at South Weipa - site of the main Aboriginal relocation - were such that "traditions have disappeared and alcohol has wreaked havoc ... the Weipa operations have caused alarm in every Aboriginal community throughout the north of Australia" (G5).
A few years later, the sociologist Paul Wilson, following up an apparently routine murder investigation at Weipa in 1979, analysed more closely the reasons for the devastation. He found that the rate of imprisonment among Aboriginal people at Weipa was the highest in Australia; the rate of violent crime and self-inflicted violence (a convincing indication of grave psychological malaise) was profoundly disturbing (66). The case of Alwyn Peters, which first elicited Wilson's concern, was later to be dramatised and filmed - by the well-known Australian film-maker David Bradbury (67). What is especially alarming is that this recent film (1989) State of shock, graphically describes a situation which has clearly not improved over a period of ten years. Aboriginal writer Marcia Langton - confronting criticisms that State of Shock "reinforces stereotypes of Aboriginal drunks" - wrote in a letter to David Bradbury:
"When Mrs Jean Jimmy and Mrs Rachel Peters tell us about their country and their forced removal by police in 1963, that is a powerful explanation, if not justification, of the motives of the younger people in their destructive behaviour ... it is clear that the old ways must have provided a sense of identity ... of personhood which was satisfying, and a way of life which sustained the development and growth of the person and quality of life through to old age ... The Peters family and others were rounded up and moved from Mapoon, at the whim of a mining company. As Rachel Peters explains: 'All this suffering for nothing; there has not been any mining there since they were taken away, their homes burnt' (68, 69)".Mapoon and Weipa were two of the oldest reserves in Australia (46). "Missionised" by servants of God, many of whom were little more than racist despots, the area they comprised was cursed as the site of some 3,000 million tonnes of bauxite worth an estimated A$60 billion (46). In 1957, Comalco (then a wholly-owned subsidiary of CRA's predecessor, Conzinc) opened secret negotiations with Queensland's Labor government, designed to keep all other interested parties off the newly-discovered bauxite lode. From the start, CRA/Conzinc refused to attend any meetings to discuss compensation with the Aboriginal people living on the land (44). Mapoon and Weipa
The same year, as a new right-wing government took power in the state, Comalco and its friends in power pushed through Parliament the Commonwealth Aluminium Corporation (Comalco) Bill. This extraordinary act of theft gave the company 2,270 square miles of Aboriginal reserve land on the west coast of Cape York, and nearly 2,000 square miles (1982) on the east coast. This was traditional Aboriginal land, though not classified as a reserve. The company was required to select, and retain within a decade,1,000 square miles of the western, and 500 square miles of the eastern, leases for a minimum of 105 years. The other 1270 square miles had to be relinquished by Comalco over a period of 20 years (44, 46). The royalty was set at a mere 5 cents a ton - about the lowest rate in the world. (It was doubled in 1965 (46), although it went up ten-fold to a more equitable rate in 1974) (70) . Rent was set at At2 a square mile (it rose later) - only 1/160th (one hundred and sixtieth) of the normal mining rental at the time. All timber, cattle-grazing, water and farming rights in the lease area were granted to the company; some A$8.5 million was given in government aid for infrastructure; and Comalco was exempted from the Clean Water Act.
Not one of the demands made by the Presbyterian Church of Queensland - the mission authority at the time - was accepted by the government: there was to be no compensation (because all the "natives" would be employed), no Native Welfare Fund, no exclusive pastoral rights for the mission, and no other safeguarded Aboriginal rights (71). Comalco's attitude to Aboriginal self-determination was quite clear: Sir Maurice Mawby, a director of Conzinc, told the mission in August 1957: "We aim to provide a gradual and satisfactory means of assimilating suitable natives" (72). Comalco, said Sir Maurice Mawby, was prepared to help with native education and employment opportunities the salve to bad conscience that the missionaries most required (46). At the same time, Comalco would pay for the eviction of Aborigines from Weipa, and assist in the removal of families from Mapoon if necessary - although the company did not initially need their land.
From the very start then - and whatever the protestations of innocence by Comalco in the years to come - mining and eviction were two sides to the same dirty coin.
Comalco's initial proposal was to move Mapoon and Weipa residents to Aurukun - a reserve area some 80km south. They refused. In 1960, Comalco, on its own accord, built a settlement at Hey Point, on the mouth of the river opposite its mining headquarters. But, once again, the Mapoon and Weipa people refused to relocate.
Comalco maintained its pressure on the mission to get the Aboriginal communities out from under its feet. The Weipa people were forced into a tiny area set aside for them at Weipa South, some nine miles from the white mining town at Weipa North. This mere 308-acre plot was far removed from their traditional hunting grounds (much of which has been devastated beyond redemption, the game having fled). Their old homes were bulldozed off the beach as an "eyesore," and it was many years before anything like adequate housing, sewerage, and any pretence of training and education, were provided (46, 73). While priding itself on its "gifts" to the community, a strain of patronising puritanism has run through much of Comalco's attitude to remuneration. There is abundant evidence that cash alone has been socially destructive in many Aboriginal communities (74). Comalco has also consistently refused to consider anything approaching royalties or compensation.
However, there are two much-vaunted benefits which, the company declares, support its case for mining. The first is employment of Aborigines - intended under Queensland government policy to be the solvent for assimilation. In reality, employment has been meagre (only 10% of the workforce was Aboriginal in 1977) (75). During much of Weipa South's existence, and despite government policies of supposed equal wages, Aborigines have worked on the lowest economic rung. In 1963 they were still being classified as "handicapped, being unintegrated to the industrial demands of our society" (76). Weipa South remains the impoverished, black township, and Weipa North the modern mining town. The parallels with South Africa are all too clear (46).
A second beneficence, supposedly visited on the community by the company, is its rehabilitation of mined-out lands. It is only in the last decade that Comalco has made any real effort to compensate for some of the devastation it has caused. By 1975, only 300 hectares had been revegetated. In late 1976, Senator O'Keefe, deputy leader of the Labor opposition, reported that the exotic tree species used by the company (79) condemned the landscape to "total dead[ness]" - failing to provide food for indigenous birds or animals (77). The following year the company was compounding the error, experimenting with Burma teak, mahogany and cypress trees, aiming at planting some 400 hectares of these every year (75). In 1981 an investigator, looking at the general environmental impact of the mining, praised the company's apparently "good attitude to regeneration of mined-out areas" (it was spending about A$5000 per hectare in 1980), but found that Comalco persisted in trying to grow commercial crops, with "little success".... "Huge fertiliser requirements make planting costs astronomical. One species of tree, an exotic called African Mahogany, is the only one showing signs of usefulness". (This investigation did find that regeneration of pre-mined vegetation was relatively successful) (78).
Comalco has made much of the climatic problems on the Cape York peninsula and the prevalence of termites. It cites drought, fire and flood (during a heavy wet season the water table can rise to the surface) as factors which "seriously limit the range of tree species which can be grown" (79). What it does not say, of course, is that mining is the prime factor in constricting the choices available in rehabilitation: though it does admit that the "ironstone mine floor which lies immediately below the relaid overburden" is so "compacted by mine machinery during the mining operation" that it has to be "ripped to allow plant penetration and development" (79).
The Australian Financial Review in 1977 predicted that, thanks to its timber operations on Aboriginal land in Cape York, Comalco by 2000 AD "will be a major timber group" (75). This was too close to suggesting that, having ripped-off and ripped-out the heart of Aboriginal traditional country, CRA was now going to misappropriate whatever meagre fruits the barren land could support. Its public statements in the late 1970s stressed that, by starting forestry, agricultural or pastoral activities, Comalco could "obviously benefit the Weipa community and the State of Queensland," and that Weipa South council members "have expressed approval about the rate of growth in the regenerated areas, the high proportion of native species and the abundant evidence of birds and animals returning to the replanted forest areas" (81).
In fact, the majority of Aboriginal people at Weipa have expressed grave disapproval of the company's ill-fated attempts to rehabilitate the area. Joyce Hall, one of the most prominent members of the community, travelled to Europe in 1981 to testify at an international tribunal on the degree to which her land had been rendered a veritable dustbowl (82). Comalco eventually won the defamation case which it had brought against the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) for similar allegations made by Joyce Hall in the Granada TV film Strangers in their own land (64). However, during that trial, Weipa people gave eloquent testimony on the degree to which Comalco had failed to keep its promises. Gertude Molton testified that mining had destroyed the hunting, while their homes flooded in the wet season. According to Andrew Miller, Comalco was not re-planting local varieties of plants, and animals would not return to their original habitat. Stanley Budbury said that he and his people had to walk twenty miles to catch pigs (64). Perhaps the central testimony came again from Joyce Hall. For the first time in more than twenty years, she chose to tell publicly what had happened when bulldozers first moved onto her ancestral land at Weipa Tongue- tied by emotion, she had to leave the court at one point. When she returned, she declared:
"Since the mining come, a real sacred place was destroyed ... that is where the bodies, the deads, were put on the trees. In our own traditional ways, the bodies are not buried. They are put up into the trees until the grease is down ... left to dry before we could go back. This was destroyed when they burnt and knocked the trees down. They did not know it was there. Of course whiteman should know better. Ask first." (83).The Aboriginal community at Mapoon was a hindrance and an embarrassment: to the church, because it was becoming militant and resistant to assimilation; to the Queensland government, because it showed too many signs of being able to live independently; to Comalco because, while the company had no immediate plans to mine on mission land, it had every intention of doing so later. Indeed, the Mapoon people themselves remember being told by both the government and the Mission that "Comalco would come and turn our homes over with bulldozers, and they would dig holes all over our hunting grounds" (69).
Various mailed-fist-in-velvet-glove tactics - and more belligerent ones - were used to persuade the Mapoon people to leave "voluntarily". If a woman went off to the hospital to have her baby, she was not allowed to return home; if a man went off the reserve to find work, he was banned from coming back.
In 1963, the Missionaries packed up and went. Despite closing down all the community facilities, some seventy Aboriginal people remained. It was then that they really asserted their independence: living off the bush, ferrying-in from Weipa necessary supplies and looking after their own cattle (84). But then, under cover of darkness on November 15, 1963, armed police slunk into Mapoon, arrested the entire community, burned their homes, the church, school, stores and shops. The Elders were transported to another reserve. Some other people remained but they too were forced off within the year (69). Two years later, Alcan of Canada was to be granted a lease over much of the lands not contained within the Comalco lease (46).
Notwithstanding this act of terrorism, some Mapoon people returned to land not yet affected by mining in 1974. In order to enable the State government to close down their camp, Comalco later turned-over this part of the lease to the state authorities. Despite closure of the community's bank account, and denial of social benefits, many of the people remained. In its one act of charity during this whole repugnant saga, by 1979 Comalco had returned the resettled area and the site of the old Mapoon mission to the people (still, of course, under the repressive tutelage of the Queensland government). Comalco continued to mine on the remainder of their land in the old Mapoon Aboriginal reserve (46).
At around this time, Comalco was laying plans to open up further bauxite mines on the Aurukun reserve, south of Weipa, along a coastal strip eight miles wide, fifty miles long and more than 750 square kilometres in area (46, 84). The plan was linked to proposed mining by a consortium of foreign companies, called Aurukun Associates (Tipperary, Billiton, Pechiney). To date, mining has not taken place at Aurukun. Nonetheless, the Associates' and Comalco's plans had severe consequences for Aboriginal people, not only at Aurukun but throughout north Queensland. Initially the Aurukun people were able to halt the operations. In retaliation, the Bjelke-Peterson regime went to the Privy Council and won permission to award mining contracts. Shortly afterwards, the regime arbitrarily cancelled the reserve status of Aurukun and Mornington Island, making them shires under control of an administrator: a return to the worst days of the early twentieth century, when Queensland had itself shown the architects of South African apartheid the way to solve their "native problem" (85). It was not until several years later, that the Queensland government modified its legislation affecting Queensland's Aboriginal people living on reserves (86, 87).
CRA now controls the world's single largest diamond production company, operating the world's most lucrative diamond mine. The history of the Argyle diamond mines is one of deception, derring-do, devastation and divide-and-rule of which perhaps only RTZ's favourite son is capable. The Argyle Diamond Mines Joint Venture was originally one of many outfits, sparked by the Kimberley diamond rush of the 1970s. The Kalumburu JV was formed in 1972 by five companies, and CRA began "farming" into this group a few years later. By the end of 1976, it had secured 35% in what was then known as the Ashton Joint Venture(AJV): this gave CRA management rights (88). That year the AJV held prospecting leases covering 450,000 square kilometres (88). In 1977 and 1978, CRA secured the minority shares of both the Belgium company Sibeka (89) and Jennings Holdings. By the end of 1978, it controlled nearly 60% of the Joint Venture (90). At Argyle
Meanwhile, a new Western Australia Mining Act was being pushed through, squeezing out smaller prospectors, and giving favoured status to the mining corporations (91). Throughout 1978, the company received increasingly sparkling reports of finds in the kimberlite diamond pipes located around Lake Argyle (92). No less than 26 pipes covering 600 hectares had been confirmed by the end of that year (93), and bulk sampling had commenced (94).
The value of CRA's market capitalisation took a huge leap at this point: up by half a billion dollars. As the ever-vigilant Australian Financial Review put it: "Expressed another way, the value of Rio Tinto-Zinc Corporation's investment in CRA has jumped A$308 million". This meant that the cost of reducing RTZ's equity in CRA to the level stipulated by the FIRB (see above) had itself increased to around A$100 million - thus making it even less likely than before (95).
It was important to CRA's interests to conceal both the value of its finds and their exact location. In a deft display of double bluff, it bought out other company leases in the Argyle area, by convincing competitors that its interests really lay there (96, 106). For as long as it could, it also refused to release details of its discoveries (97). When the Melbourne Stock Exchange took it to task, CRA agreed to publish certain details of specific finds - but only at a relatively late stage (98). At this time, too - though scarcely noticed - the AJV began talks with the Anglo American/De Beers' Central Selling Organisation (CSO) over eventual marketing (99).
Early 1979 saw the discovery of many small diamonds in the area (100). AJV was by now firmly dominated by CRA (56.8%) with Ashton Mining (46.3% controlled by the Malaysian Mining Corp Bhd) holding 24.2% and AO (Australia), itself controlled by the Malaysian government, holding 4.9% (101). Much to the chagrin of those who have long campaigned for Australian control of Australian resources, this meant that potentially the most important national mining project in the 1980s was now in foreign hands. Tanust (a subsidiary of Union Miniere's Tanganyika Consolidated, or Tanks) held - and still holds - just over 9%. The only domestic equity was 5% in the hands of Northern Mining, managed by the Bond Corporation.
The following year, CRA formed Argyle Diamond Mines Pty Ltd, and two years later the AJV was replaced by Argyle Diamond Mines JV (ADMJV) and Ashton Exploration, to be managed by CRAE (88).
Towards the end of 1979, the JV announced its most exciting discovery: an "extremely rich" central kimberlite pipe on the Glen Hill-Lissadell border area (a pastoral station), comparable with any find in South Africa (102).
The Western Australian Minister of Mines approved mining - even though the AJV itself continued referring only to "sampling" (and, in order to conceal the true extent of its discovery, barred journalists from entering its prospect) (103). The area was by then massively disturbed, criss-crossed by roads and camps, the product of"booty" or "raider-type" sampling techniques (103, 104). The decision to mine was finally announced in July 1980.
Between 1982 and 1985, world diamond production (both gem and industrial) increased by more than 40% (41.4%) (105). This was almost entirely due to production from Argyle (105).
Mining of the proximal alluvials started in early 1983 and, of the Argyle pipe itself - "actually a crater, 1600m long and from 150 to 600m wide at the surface, approximately 45ha in size" (106) - in late 1985. Twenty two million tonnes of overburden had to be stripped away (107). Once mining at this deposit was on the cards, CRA began dropping a large number of its east Kimberley claims (108).
CRA was now riding a whirlwind. Its share of Argyle profits quadrupled in the first six months of 1986 (109). By 1988, the JV was admitting that its original estimate of 70 million tonnes of reserves had been "conservative" (110) and, in early 1989, the partners shelled out nearly A$40 million to develop deposits around the kimberlite pipe, AK-I (111).
In the late 1970s, CRA had dealt with noises off-stage from two smaller Australian companies with interests in the region. The Afro-West Company, based in Perth, claimed it had staked five areas in the middle of the kimberlite pipe, after CRA's claims had been allowed to lapse and before they were renewed. Afro-West's court challenge was voided, and in November 1981 the West Australian legislature confirmed the rights of the AJV to the whole pipe (106).
Northern Mining, the very junior partner in the whole venture, had challenged very low estimates of the value of its early discoveries. (The CSO, on behalf of CRAE and AJV gave a value of A$ 11 a carat, while Northern Mining's assessor had valued them at nearly double). While this argument was never really settled, Northern Mining itself sold out to the Western Australian Diamond Trust (WADT) in 1983 (106). This was a sop to public demands that some share of the fabulous profits predicted from Argyle would go towards Australians (albeit the wealthier ones) rather than outsiders.
But, five years later, the Western Australian government sold its own taxpayers short, by putting WADT out to tender. CRA and Ashton Mining picked up the booty: CRA thereby increasing its equity in the JV to 57.8% (112). The participation of WADT in the Argyle Diamonds Mines ensured that at least a small proportion of the output was marketed outside the CSO. In 1983, CRA and Ashton Mining formed Argyle Diamond Sales (ADS) to market their lion's share of production. All the gem diamonds, except for a small proportion retained for cutting and polishing in the state, go to the CSO. Around three-quarters of cheap gem and industrial stones are also marketed through the De Beers organisation (4). The agreement with the CSO lasted until 1991 (113). When the deal with De Beers was being made, there was considerable opposition from many sectors of the Australian public: the spectre of Australia's most important gem-find being controlled by South African interests was too much for many people to bear. At this time, the Aboriginal Mining Information Centre (AMIC), and researcher Jan Roberts, exposed the links between the Oppenheimers, CRA (through Charter Consolidated's 10% holding in RTZ) and Ashton Mining (Charter Consolidated holding 28% of the Malaysian Mining Corporation and a small indirect interest in Tanks). In response, bullets were fired through the AMIC offices and its workers were chased around Melbourne (114). (To this day it is not known who was responsible for these acts of terrorism, though one AMIC worker publicly identified CRA as being responsible for hounding him personally) (115).
CRA's much more careful approach to Aboriginal communities at Oombulgurri (mentioned earlier) or its comparatively low profile at Ellendale - another potentially lucrative diamond region on Aboriginal land (85, 105) - derived primarily from its 1978 decision to concentrate on Lake Argyle. In fact, CRA has not dropped its Ellendale claim, and regards it as "highly prospective". And, despite its 1985 decision to drop a large number of claims in the east Kimberleys, the Kimberley Land Council reported then that CRA was "... still proving to be a difficult company to deal with, intent on blaming Aboriginal people for any interruptions to [its] exploration programmes, even when these interruptions are clearly caused by external market conditions" (108).
In 1982, ADM commissioned an Environmental Research and Management Programme (ERMP) (116), which admitted that five areas of spiritual significance, and no less than seventeen archeological sites, had been destroyed as a direct result of the company's activities. The ERMP also recognised the considerable fears of Aboriginal people that they would lose access to their land (about 5500ha was initially required for the mine development), and have to compete with whites for the use of their fishing holes, swimming holes, camp sites and hunting as well as social areas.
Despite this, in May the following year the Western Australian government gave permission for the mine to proceed - subject to eight conditions being met. Nine months later, the government also proposed an ex-gratia A$1,000,000 payment to affected Aboriginal communities for a minimum of five years. But it did not address the question of who would decide the criteria for "affected" communities, nor how money could be distributed so as to maximise Aboriginal self-management.
Two of the conditions laid down in ADM's own report have still not been fulfilled: those relating to Aboriginal site protection and management, and the employment of Aboriginal people at the mine (117). Of the eight conditions laid down by the government three are worth quoting here:
4. [That] the company closely monitors social impacts, especially during the construction phase. It should cooperate with private and government agencies to overcome adverse impacts.6. [That] an Impact Assessment group be established ... including Aboriginal groups ... with a view to further development of Government and company social programmes ... which will pave the way to avoid conflict and confrontation.
8. [That] the company consults with government and local Aboriginal groups, with a view to changing the management of funds contributed under the "Good Neighbour Programme".
In July 1984, representatives of four major bodies (Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies of the Australian National University; Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies; Anthropology Department of the University of Western Australia and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia) visited the Lake Argyle region. In a report to the Kimberley Land Council (KLC) and the National Aboriginal Conference, they delivered a profound indictment of the way in which the company had failed to implement the conditions laid down for the ERPM.
Some of the ERPM's conclusions were as follows:
The Good Neighbour Programme (GNP) has actively denied Aboriginal aspirations to land, refusing funds which could enable them to develop outstations (an essential antidote to social disintegration). The overall effect of the GNP has been to increase the company's social and political control of Aboriginal affairs, and dampen potential Aboriginal opposition. All Aboriginal people expressed a desire to be free of handouts and dependence on a European-type economic system. However, GNP funds can only be spent on capital works and the company determines what these are. Aborigines have no control over the determination of priorities for expenditure. As the number of capital items increases, so does the need for recurrent funding to maintain them, making an already poor community poorer. Exclusion of Aboriginal opinion/management reduces the people to passive victims and this, in turn, preempts effective Aboriginal leadership.
There is now competition for fishing and recreation sports from mine workers. Important Aboriginal food sources are being exploited and, in some places, destroyed.
Kununarra (the township nearby), is such that land suitable for residential purposes is limited. Company proposals to house staff and dependants will place housing out of reach of many Aboriginal families. One result of this has been the enforced eviction of Lily Creek people, for whom derisory compensation arrived in the form of one Toyota!
The clear signal from the company has been that favourable decisions and fund releases depend on maintenance of good interpersonal relationships and deference to company agents. These personnel now exercise an influence over the direction of Aboriginal affairs in the region that rivals the Department of Aboriginal Affairs (DAA), or Aboriginal Development Commission (ADC), approach to block funding, and entirely eclipses the State's community welfare and Aboriginal planning authority. Since the company's Aboriginal affairs policy tends to operate against government policy, this should be a matter of concern to both State and Federal governments.
At no time has the company entered into discussions with the communities in respect of Aboriginal employment. Aboriginal people represent 56% of the local population, but of the ADM workforce of approximately 1000, only 8 are Aboriginal, 3 of them locals, with 4 Aboriginal apprentices (government-subsidised). Training in semi-skilled occupations is nonexistent. Six people have been offered menial work for a few weeks. Wages are not equivalent to those of white workers. As a consequence, the main mine settlement is kept predominantly white.
As pressure increases on both formal and informal systems of control, so does the sense of alienation felt by some Aboriginal youth. Nothing has been done to prevent this. The Warringarri "drop-in centre" was sold from under the young peoples' feet, and no such facilities now exist.
ADM senior personnel demand more academic subjects in the District High School with the result that, resources being limited, other areas of the school programme will be lost. No government or company action is taken to prevent this. The number of Aboriginal children leaving the education system has increased.
Increased tourism puts pressure on land in direct conflict with the need of Aboriginal communities. Tourist interests do not want Land Rights granted.
Family-based community decision-making structures are breaking down. In a 34-day period, the Warmun community was required to be involved in 42 meetings. Although ADM does have a working relationship with John Toby and other men of the Mandangala community, the company does not enjoy the confidence of the majority of Aboriginal communities in the region. It is without the Aboriginal contacts needed to obtain information on which to base an impact evaluation. It has no competence in the field of Aboriginal Affairs.
From the outset of the project it has been clear that Aboriginal groups would be profoundly affected, both by the direct effect of mining and exploration, and by the policies devised by the company to deal with the local communities, who have little recourse against actions and policy decisions of the Argyle developers. The repercussions of this major development leave the Aboriginal groups isolated, disadvantaged and powerless, without means to articulate their grievances, and with the company not subject to close government or public scrutiny. Since there has been no independent assessment of ADM, it has become increasingly urgent that Aboriginal interests are not rendered invisible (118). As of 1986, still no effective structures to monitor the effects of the mine had been established (64). Within two years, certain changes had occurred for the better, in housing, employment and social amenities. But the "Good Neighbour" programme continues to be administered by the company. Security controls still deprive Aboriginal women of access to the Barramundi dreaming (what's left of it) (119). And the company's insensitivity to Aboriginal claims is such that, when a delegation from the Western Desert Puntukurnuparna visited Argyle in 1988 to see for themselves what awaited them if they gave consent for mining to take place in the Rudall River region (Karlamilyi) - they were not allowed to climb the hill and view the destruction the company had wrought.
As for the destruction - real and potential wrought on the Western Desert people themselves by CRA, that is a continuing story. CRA holds numerous leases (sometimes joint leases with other companies) over at least a third of the Rudall River National Park (WA): it has extended its exploration to the south of this ecoregion "looking for diamonds", and had entered into a provisional "site avoidance agreement" with the Ngaanyatjarra Council, while ranging over a huge area of traditional land hugging the NT border (120). Rudall River
Described as a "three act nightmare - uranium, in a National Park, on Aboriginal land" (121), the Rudall River saga evokes uncanny comparisons with many of CRA's previous exploits in Aboriginal country. There has been a strategy as at Lake Argyle - to hive off one group of people from another, and conclude deals with them, which are then produced as "evidence" that Aborigines have agreed to exploration and mining (122). Certainly, the Strelley Mob (comprising many of the Nomads - see section on the Pilbara below) did conclude a site-avoidance agreement with Canning Resources, CRAE's front company in the Park. But in 1989, when many of them discovered that their white "leader" Don McCleod was, both figuratively and literally, in the CRA camp, and that the other Western Desert people firmly opposed all mining on their lands, they withdrew their nominal support for the company's plans (123).
There has been the customary batch of protestations from CRA that their work conforms to guidelines laid down as early as 1978, when mining conditions for Rudall River were first gazetted (124). Yet the company has broken many of the elementary rules: situating base camps close to water and rock holes, interfering with vegetation close to water sources, disturbing plants, dumping rubbish, and constructing access tracks without government permission (125). CRA has accused Aboriginal people of harassing its operations to the extent that, in 1984, it had withdrawn from part of the Park, without being able to conclude an exploration agreement with the Western Desert Land Council (126). The truth is that it had already finished its programme for that year and had neither the need, nor the volition, to reach agreement with "awkward" Aboriginal people (127).
In the last two years, CRA has also cultivated accusations that the white employees of the Western Desert Land Council (Western Desert Puntukurnuparna) are "manipulating" the Aboriginal people - a clear echo from the late 1970s when it was deliberately undermining the roles played by North Queensland and Kimberley Land Councils in supporting traditional communities (128).
The Rudall River region is the likely site of a huge minerals deposit on a par with Roxby Downs (Olympic Dam) or Arnhemland. Under conditions of considerable secrecy, CRA had been exploring the Park for no less than eighteen years (129). In 1979, it upgraded its exploration programme after discovering significant deposits of uranium, along with some copper, gold, lead, zinc, platinum and bismuth (130). By the end of 1987, CRA had spent A$20 million exploring some 8000 square kilometres of this part of the western desert, including 6000 square kilometres within the Rudall River National Park (131). It held around 35 exploration licences, and 6 mining leases, inside or on the boundaries of the Park (132).
One of these leases, at Kintyre (Karlamilyi) (133), has been confirmed as a world-class uranium deposit, with 15,000 tonnes of resources and 20,000 tonnes of possible reserves. However, estimates of the extent and grade of the lode have been increasing over the past two years. A new drilling programme, costing A$ 10 million (134), in mid-1988 revealed further deposits which could make both an open-cut, and an underground operation, viable (135). In early 1989, reserves were upped by another 1000 tonnes (136), and it has been stressed continually by CRA that Kintyre is only one part of a potentially vast uranium province (137).
Apart from being an extremely important - and unique - eco-region, rich in fauna and flora (much of it still to be recorded) (138), Rudall River has for around a decade been home for 300 or more Martu (Aborigines) from the Manjiljarra, Martujarra and Warnman people, who began returning to their traditional country after thirty and more years of enforced removal and missionisation (mainly at the Jigalong reserve). The outstation of Punmu was established in 1981 and, three years later, another at Parngurr (Pangurr) (139).
More recently it is the people at Parngurr who have had good cause to be gravely alarmed by CRA's intentions. In 1987, the company announced plans to start drilling at three sites within close distance (up to 10km) of a sacred women's dreaming, Mount Cotten (140). This, and CRA's previous activities, convinced the communities that they must stop the prospecting, until all the implications could be assessed and properly discussed. Under national and international pressure (e.g. from Survival International) in late 1987, the Western Australian government created an "exclusion zone" around Parngurr, from which mining would be temporarily (and possibly permanently) banned. Exploration, reconnaissance, and mining outside this zone was subject to environmental and social impact studies and site-avoidance agreements, "involving full consultation with and input from Aboriginal interests" (141).
At an historic meeting in the desert between the Martu, CRA, Uranen, other mining representatives, tourist interests, and assorted government officials, in May 1989, the Aboriginal community made it abundantly clear that they did not want mining - especially uranium mining - under any circumstances on their lands (123).
Meanwhile, as the Australian Labor Party conducted a re-assessment in 1988-89 of its "three mines" uranium policy, CRA and the Western Mining Corporation mounted a large-scale public relations offensive, to convince the Australian public that new mines had to open, to take advantage of a "window of opportunity" scheduled for the early 1990s (137, 142).
The legendary Broken Hill ore field in New South Wales (NSW) was the site of CRA's first operations. In 1905, Melbourne businessmen set up the Zinc Corporation Ltd, to process lead and zinc residues from "the Fabulous Hill" (14, 29). Later, the Corporation became the largest producer of such concentrates in the whole of Australia (14). Its future was assured during the first World War (1917), when the British government negotiated a long-term contract for zinc concentrates (14). And, in 1949, the Zinc Corporation merged with the National Smelting Corporation - later the Imperial Smelting Corporation Ltd - to become the Consolidated Zinc Corporation Ltd (14, 29). With its head office in London, the new Conzinc had close links with the "Collins House" families of the Melbourne business establishment (143). Lead and zinc
The 1962 merger with Rio Tinto naturally transformed some of the operations and objectives of Conzinc; but, essentially, the merger was a vehicle for confirming the penetration of British capital in Australia and facilitating the repatriation of profits. It was logical that, in 1971, seeking further control over downstream processing, the Zinc Corp and the British New Broken Hill Consolidated (NBHC) formed in 1936 (and then owned one third by CRA), should merge to become Australian Mining and Smelting (144). This gave CRA control over the Avonmouth lead and zinc smelter in Britain, and a half share in the Budel zinc smelter in the Netherlands (145).
CRA's operations at Broken Hill, held through AM&S Mining, and consisting of the NBHC mine and Cobar mine, were amalgamated in 1987. They are now known as the CZ mine: recent reserves were set at nearly 30 million tonnes of ore, grading 8% lead, 11% zinc and 70g/tonne of silver (8, 146).
While their potential is still considerable (in 1986 they were producing 6% of the western world's lead and 4% of its zinc) (147), their grades have been getting lower, and they have been beset by discontent. Morale was "at the lowest for thirty years", declared John Butcher, head of the Workers' Industrial Union (WIU), in early 1987, as the workforce at the Port Pirie smelter went on strike (36).
In 1984 the Broken Hill workforce had gone on strike for seven and a half weeks (148). Two years later they were out even longer (149), as CRA sought to double the number of shifts, impose night work, and drastically cut the workforce. This attrition was too great and, in an agreement imposed by the courts (150), CRA and North Broken Hill (NBH) ended up with more or less what they had wanted, and a reduction of 40% in the workforce (151).
The zinc-copper producer, Cobar, has also experienced problems mainly due to the fall in ore grades (8). Acquired in 1980 from Broken Hill South, it has a long history of industrial dissatisfaction which culminated in CRA threatening to close it completely, unless more productivity was offered by the workforce (152). After four years of losses, the mine was shut in 1985. An expansion programme was then carried out and, since re-opening, Cobar has proved a competent producer. Productivity per miner in 1987 was reportedly twice that of CRA's operations at Broken Hill (8).
Cobar supplies copper to the Port Kembla smelter which was due to double its capacity in March 1989 (153). Operated by AM&S Associated Smelters, a subsidiary of Electrolytic Refining and Smelting Co of Australia Ltd (ER&S), it sold out 40% of its equity to a Japanese group, led by Furukawa, in 1988 (1).
Fortunes have been worse at the Woodlawn mine near Canberra. Opened in 1979 as another lead-zinc-copper producer, ore recovery soon proved difficult (154). In 1985 CRA bought the mine from Phelps Dodge and St Joe, a subsidiary of the US company, Fluor (155). Within barely a year, the open-pit mine was scheduled to close, and underground mining to commence (156). But Woodlawn had been characterised by "poor operating performance for most of its life" (4) and, not surprisingly, CRA sold the mine in 1987 to Denehurst Ltd (8).
AM&S Associated Smelters also operates a smelter at Cockle Creek, NSW, which handles lead and zinc bullion and turns out copper sulphide, silver, gold, and cadmium, as well as sulphuric acid (14), while its Pacific Smelting Company subsidiary in Los Angeles and Memphis, USA, also recycles scrap (14).
But by far the biggest smelting operation within the AM&S network is the Port Pirie smelter operated by Broken Hill Associated Smelters (BHAS) - perhaps the world's largest lead smelter and refinery (157).
In 1974, CRA had increased its interest in BHAS from 50% to 70%, by doing a share swap with the Australian company BH South. The Labour government of the day - highly sensitive to attempts by foreign companies to control even more of Australia's resources (this was the period of the Fitzgerald Enquiry, referred to below) - put the deal under investigation. Unfortunately, the investigation committee on foreign take-overs concluded that, since CRA was already foreign-controlled and there was nothing in principle to prevent foreign equity being increased, the take-over had to be allowed (44). At this time CRA was a part of a zinc cartel, one of whose effects was to ensure that Australian manufacturing industry actually paid more for its zinc than the London market (158). Despite the passage of the Australian Trade Practices Act, designed to prevent such cartels, CRA had been operating its price fixing ring with impunity (158).
In early 1988, CRA announced that it would amalgamate its Australian and international base metal interests into AM&S Metals Pty Ltd, which would market BHAS and Sulphide Corporation output (159). This preceded a merger between the lead-zinc mining and smelting operations of North Broken Hill Peko (NBHP) and CRA, which was completed in July 1988 (160). (North Broken Hill Holdings and Peko Wallsend had already amalgamated in 1987) (161).
The new company, Pasminco, was effectively a response to the earlier merger between the operations of MIM, Teck, and Metallgesellschaft. The only valid reason for it, commented RTZ's chief economist Phillip Crowson, was "the very real opportunity for the companies to cut their costs" (162).
As part of the deal, NBHP contributed to the new monolith (which makes Broken Hill "a one company town" said the Mining Journal (163)) its west coast lead, zinc, gold and silver operations, its Risdon electro-zinc smelter in Tasmania, its Elura mine at Cobar, a zinc smelter in South Australia and, of course, its Broken Hill mine (North) (164).
For its part, as well as contributing its Broken Hill operations, CRA has merged into Pasminco its Impalloy, ISC Alloys, and Pacific Zinc, operations (owned by Commonwealth Smelting Ltd) and both NBHP and CRA have dished-in A$25 million each, to up-grade the Avonmouth smelter (165) and the Budelco refinery in the Netherlands - 50% owned by Billiton (Royal Dutch Shell) (164). Broken Hill Associated Smelters is now owned 70% by CRA and 30% by NBHP (166).
Following a public share issue in early 1989, CRA's interest in Pasminco itself fell to 40% (1).
Both the Port Pirie and Avonmouth smelters have been the subject of nagging criticism over many years by environmentalists and health authorities.
The Avonmouth smelter is situated on an estuary near the major city of Bristol, in England's west country. A long-established plant producing zinc (it's the only primary zinc producer in Britain), lead bullion, cadmium and sulphuric acid, it fell on hard times in the 1970s. By 1983, with over-capacity in the world zinc industry and slack demand from customers (168), two alternatives were presented by the company (Commonwealth Smelters) to the workforce: closure or a drastic "survival plan". A third option - to join the EEC-coordinated capacity reduction programme - was never pursued (168) and, as zinc prices rose towards the end of 1983, the EEC plan was itself abandoned (169).
In the event, the survival plan was pushed through - although it meant redundancies for nearly one third of the workforce (1,000 down to 700 employees). Profits soon rose (4), although further setbacks were experienced in 1985 (116, 170). By the late 1980s, Avonmouth was a comparative economic success story.
Not so, however, for much of the workforce and the communities surrounding the plant. As early as 1969, many workers were diagnosed as suffering from lead poisoning, and a government enquiry was held into the plant's operations (171). Three years later, Duncan Dewdney, RTZ's chief executive in the UK, "openly confessed that the plant's initial construction was skimped, that corners were cut and that it should have cost at least two million pounds more" (172).
In 1985, soon after the survival plan was implemented, Dr George Kazantzis of the Trade Union Congress (TUC) Institute of Occupational Health at the University of London, carried out an investigation which appeared to show increased lung cancers at the plant. Two years before, Kazantzis and a colleague had also investigated mortality from lung cancers among cadmium workers - many of whom came from the Avonmouth plant (173). The second of the two studies did not satisfy CRA, as it appeared to show that the risks were greater than they had ever admitted. There is evidence that the parent company in Britain (RTZ) took steps to suppress publication of the document (64). In any event, it was not until 1987 that the study was accepted for publication by the British Journal of Industrial Medicine, and it was well over a year before the report was published. This concluded that workers in the smelter - particularly those who had been employed for more than 20 years - exhibited an excess of lung cancer, although it was not possible to pin down which of the contaminants - arsenic, lead or other materials - might be responsible (174).
Meanwhile, a TV research team had been looking at health and safety at the plant. Interviewed for the programme, a co-author of the Kazantzis report, Tony Ades, confirmed that there was a definite relationship between lung cancer, exposure to cadmium, arsenic and lead workers' deaths, and the length of time they worked at the plant (175). Residents close to the Avonmouth smelter, interviewed in the programme, also expressed their opinion that the community had been put at risk from Avonmouth's continued operations (176).
The following year, across the world at Port Pirie, a health survey of 537 pre-school children drew a direct relationship between the slower mental development of four-year-olds, their blood/lead levels, and the presence of the Port Pirie smelter (177).
The Port Kembla smelter was itself under scrutiny in 1987, as the New South Wales State Pollution Control Commission declared that the plant did not conform to pollution standards (178). After an economic study of the project, CRA decided to update the smelter and expand its output (178).
The Pilbara region accounts for virtually all of Australia's iron ore production - itself around 10% of the world's (179). In the Pilbara, CRA's wholly-owned Hamersley Holdings Ltd is the biggest producer (8). Hamersley owns and operates the large Mount Tom Price deposit and the Paraburdoo mine, linked to Tom Price by rail (5). In 1986, it also acquired half of CSR's Yandicoogina deposit, some 140km east of Mt Tom Price at the other end of a lease held by Broken Hill Proprietary (BHP). This prompted the Financial Times to remark: "... Australia's two largest companies now sit at either end of the Yandicooga deposit" (180). Pilbara
In 1981, RTZ purchased Texasgulf's 50% stake in the Wittenoom and Rhode Ridge iron ore lodes (181). But, with 490 million tonnes of reserves, the Marandoo deposit (Lang Hancock interests: 50%) continues to wait for markets in Europe, Asia and the Middle East (182). In 1982 the Financial Times announced that Marandoo had "basically been dropped because CRA believes it could harm the viability of the Hamersley operations" (183).
CRA announced in 1986 that it would develop a new deposit at Channar, near Paraburdoo, together with the China Metallurgical Import and Export Corp (CMIEC) (5). The deal has made Hamersley the largest supplier of iron ore to the murderous Beijing regime (8), specifically the Baoshan steel complex near Shanghai (4). Production of 10 million tonnes a year, at a cost of a quarter of a billion dollars, started in 1990 (8, 185, 410).
The Australian government banned the export of iron ore from 1945 until 1960: since the Japanese would be the main customers, the embargo was mainly for political reasons (28). The notorious Australian mining "baron", Lang Hancock, persuaded RTZ's Val Duncan to invest in the Pilbara when the embargo was lifted. Using US funding, and confident of securing the market to Japan, RTZ stepped in to negotiate for Mount Tom Price (28). One of the sweeteners for the deal was an offer by the RTZ supremo to supply Western Australia with a steel mill, in return for control over the iron ore. He got the deposits, but Western Australia has never seen the steel mill (4, 44).
The US finance secured by Duncan came mainly from First Boston Bank (186), via Kaiser Steel (part of the same outfit that partnered CRA in Comalco until quite recently). Between 1979 and 1981, CRA bought almost all the shares in Hamersley that it did not then own, by issuing new shares, and thus reducing the proportion of shareholders' existing equity (33, 187).
Through a bid made by In-Situ Processes Australia, in late 1984, CRA bought out the 6.25% of Hamersley still left to devour (5, 188).
In 1988, Hamersley recorded record shipments of more than forty million tonnes of iron ore. Spurring this production was a new agreement reached with Hamersley's key customers, the Japanese steel mills (Hamersley is Japan's largest supplier, providing 18% of Japanese needs) (189). Under this agreement, firm contracts would last for up to 23 years, with fixed annual tonnages set 5 or 6 years ahead. This was, as the Mining Journal put it: "a watershed for the iron ore industry world-wide" (189). And, of course, particularly for CRA (190).
Through much of the 'eighties, Hamersley had been looking for new joint venture partners - to share its costs - and new markets (191), but its fortunes had not been uniformly good. In 1986, after allegations of participation in an iron ore producers cartel, Hamersley had been the last company to settle price terms with its Japanese customers (192).
On the other hand, its ascendancy in the Pilbara - indeed in the world of iron ore as a whole - should not be underestimated. The Fitzgerald Report of 1974 examined the methods by which Australian and foreign-dominated companies, operating in Australia, avoided taxation while gaining subsidies from the Federal government. It accused Hamersley of paying only A$572,000 income tax, while declaring profits of A$264 million, between 1967 and 1973 (193).
However, the Tax Commissioner later failed to ensure that Hamersley paid all its dues, when Justice Gobbo ruled that certain production processes (notably those involved in blending Mt Tom Price and Paraburdoo ores) could be exempted from sales tax (33, 194).
In addition, Hamersley has gained from the decline in the Australian dollar which occurred in the mid-'eighties: its profit rise of 60% achieved in 1985, for example, was attributed principally to foreign exchange manipulation (4).
Hamersley's holeshot position in Australia's iron ore industry, and its prestige success in securing Japanese and Chinese markets, has overshadowed its deplorable industrial relations record, its bad management practices (which, according to Richie Howitt, might have been its downfall had it worked on a less expansive and rich deposit) (33), and its disregard for Aboriginal people and their rights.
The number of strikes at Hamersley over the past two decades are almost too numerous to record: in 1976 alone, there were 157 different sets of industrial action (195). In 1988 an indefinite dispute with CRA halted all shipping of iron and salt in and out of Dampier, Cape Lambert and Port Hedland (196). It was answered by the inevitable layoffs and cutbacks to "eliminate inefficiency" (197).
The deprivation and marginalisation of Pilbara Aboriginal people must rank alongside that of any other Australian Aboriginal community in the last fifty years. By the early years of the century, the Pilbara Aboriginal people (the Martu) - where they had not been killed - were virtual slaves of the cattle stations (46). Their situation marginally improved over the next forty years, but conditions on the pastoral leases compelled many of them to join the famous Pilbara Strike in 1946, led by Dooley and Clancy, two Aboriginal men, assisted by Don McCleod (33,46). The strikers were determined to run their own cattle stations, and gain money through their own mining enterprises. To this end they set up Pinden (or Pindan) as a co-operative to build self-reliant settlements. Within three years, more than 700 members of the movement were living in outstations, using miners' rights to set up camp (46, 198). They formed the Northern Development and Mining Company, which soon became the largest prospecting force in the region. From the proceeds the Aboriginal people bought one station - Yandeyarra. However, the government took over this station, and turned it into what is now the only reserve in the Pilbara. Some of those who were left at Yandeyarra then set up Nomads Ltd. The Nomads still exist - centred on Strelley Station.
When mining companies - first and foremost CRA - moved into the Pilbara, Aboriginal people began to be squeezed out of their former essential roles in the economic life of the region and, as one social science student put it, the "Giants" came to "dominate" (199). Particular impact was felt by Aboriginal people on the Roebourne reserve. A white, largely male, unattached, labour force moved into Dampier in the mid-sixties, to construct the new terminal and other Hamersley facilities. As they did so, Aboriginal people - already impoverished and marginalised - shifted to the Roebourne area, putting enormous pressure on housing, other Aboriginal families, and living resources (33, 199). Over the next few years Roebourne became a social disaster area: Aboriginal women were the victims of sexual "relief' sought by Hamersley workers, and alcohol was the only respite from tedium and degradation among Aboriginal men. "Roebourne shire in particular, and the Pilbara in general, rapidly developed an enormous contrast of wealth - extremes of "haves" and "have nots". In fact it is likely that nowhere else in Australia are these extremes exhibited in such close juxtaposition, or have developed so quickly" (33).
Hamersley refused to initiate special programmes of training and employment for Aboriginal people. Since they had to take their chance like everyone else, such false "equality" inevitably meant discrimination and increasing unemployment among Aboriginal people (33). Certainly the iron ore companies cannot be held solely to blame for much of this dissolution of culture and Aboriginal economy. Ironically, some of the legislative measures intended to equalise Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal status such as lifting the embargo on selling drink to black Australians, and awarding equal wages to pastoral workers - in the short term worked completely against Aboriginal people (33).
Nor must any analysis of the situation in the Pilbara in the past decade end on a note of hopelessness: self-reliance and Aboriginal organisation, better housing, increased employment in the urban areas, have undoubtedly helped mitigate the extremely bleak outlook of the late 1960s and 1970s. However, the invasion by the companies, and especially Hamersley, dealt a final blow to Aboriginal prospects for self-determination. "Always the highest priority has been placed [by the mining companies] on contributing maximum profits to the Group .... So, while State and Federal Governments must bear direct responsibility for many of the social decisions which have affected Roebourne Aborigines, it is the mining companies which made many of the most important decisions and who have benefitted economically from the oppression of local Aborigines" (33).
The history of Comalco is essentially the story of how Australia's vast bauxite deposits were hijacked by British capitalists and their allies in the world of high finance. Nor can the astonishing rise of this ruthless band of entrepreneurs be separated from the fortunes of CRA, itself the creature of RTZ. Comalco
During the last months of the second World War, W S Robinson, a leading light in both the Collins House group of companies and the British Consolidated Zinc Corporation, together with two Australian Labor Ministers, set up an Australian Aluminium Production Commission (AAPC) . In 1948, with public funds from the Federal and Tasmanian governments, the AAPC opened the Bell Bay smelter, using bauxite mainly supplied from Canada by Alcan. Over the next five years, a desultory and incompetent search for bauxite deposits was made within Australia, but little of value was recognised (200).
By 1953, Conzinc had its own men in key positions in the AAPC: these included a former Collins House mines manager, A J Keast, as general manager of Bell Bay, and Conzinc's exploration director, Maurice Mawby, as a Director. Shortly after the AAPC discontinued its own search for bauxite, Mawby instructed Conzinc to get back in the field. Within the next two years, Keast had deserted the AAPC to become Australian managing director of Rio Tinto Finance and Exploration (Riofinex). The Treasury representative on the AAPC, Donald Hibberd, threw in the towel to become finance director of the new company formed to exploit the Weipa bauxite deposits, after they were discovered in 1955 (200, 201). Later, Mawbywas to become the chair of CRA, remaining there until 1974.
Aluminium was a new and exciting prospect for the Conzinc group, but held enormous financial risks, primarily because huge amounts of electricity are required to refine the bauxite and smelt the alumina. Once the company had secured the Weipa bauxite deposits, and taken measures to throw the Aboriginal occupants off the richest major bauxite field in the world, it required cheap power. The one condition imposed by the new right-wing Queensland state government on Comalco was that it establish an aluminium refinery, and try to set up an aluminium smelter, too (200). Over the next four years, radical re-alignments took place within the world aluminium industry (202). British Aluminium - Conzinc's original partner in Comalco - sold out to Reynolds of the USA. In 1959, Reynolds itself pulled out. Conzinc looked around for a new partner, and finance, to exploit Weipa. It soon secured the interest of the Kaiser group of companies in the USA, whose 38%-owned Kaiser Aluminium and Chemical Corp was hungry for bauxite and processing plant (200). Meanwhile, the fabulously rich Oppenheimer family - owners of the Anglo-American Corporation and its numerous satellites - had used their British vehicle, Charter Consolidated, to obtain a good chunk (10 million shares) of Conzinc itself. This apartheid money enabled Conzinc to hold on to its half share in Comalco. (At the time, Charter Consolidated also held around 10% of RTZ, which it did not surrender until the 1980s).
By the end of 1960, Comalco had bought out the Bell Bay refinery and smelter for less than A$22 million (repaid over 16 years), which was far lower than its original cost to the Australian taxpayer (200).
At almost the same time, Kaiser announced a partnership with Comalco, to build an alumina refinery at Weipa, and a smelter at Bluff harbour, New Zealand. The Bluff (Tiwai Point) smelter was to be constructed amid raging controversy over its financing, costs, and environmental impact: a debate which, far from diminishing over the years, has intensified (see below). (Comalco had previously investigated using both the Purari River in Papua New Guinea as cheap hydro-power for a smelter (328), and Blair Athol Coal (see below). However, in terms of costs and availability, the Tiwai Point smelter won hands down).
In the event, the refinery was not constructed at Weipa, but at Gladstone in central Queensland. This plant has itself constituted a massive diversion of public resources into private hands. (Ownership in 1974 was: Kaiser 32.3%, Alcan 21.4%, Pechiney 20%, Comalco 13.8% and CRA 12.5%. Comalco later increased its ownership to 30.3%) (204). Not only did the plant not pay a cent in taxes in its early years but, as owners of the Weipa deposit, CRA and Kaiser paid substantially less than other customers for the bauxite delivered to the refinery (200), and the electricity consumed (205).
The plant also received ten million dollars' worth of free infrastructure at taxpayers' expense (200).
Over the next fifteen years, Comalco was to refine the strategies that have made it one of the world's leading profiteers from bauxite, and beneficiaries of the "added value" gained from refining and smelting it into aluminium. These ploys include: minimising Australian participation in the industry and supplying cheap raw materials to its paymasters (especially RTZ), and deliberately under-reporting its profits in Australia. One example of such transfer-pricing, exposed in the mid-70s, was Comalco selling bauxite at rock bottom prices to a Hong Kong subsidiary, which then sold it on to Showa Denko and Sumitomo Chemical: the bauxite, of course, never came within sight of Hong Kong, but went straight from Australia to Japan (200).
A case was brought against Comalco by the Tax Commissioner in this instance, but it failed. Comalco's argument, that its business was not controlled by its foreign shareholders, won the day (33, 206).
Other Comalco strategies have included: declaring its "poverty" to justify further government subsidies; blackmailing the Queensland government (as it did in 1974/75) to reduce its royalty payments; lobbying against compensation to Aboriginal people for the theft of their land; making political donations; playing a leading role in the Australian Mining Industry Council (AMIC), especially in its 1985 campaign to erase Aboriginal Land Rights (64); cutting costs on refining by using plants in third world countries with cheap labour; operating few, if any, pollution controls. Comalco also bought a 20% share - increased by 17.5% in 1985 (4) - in the Euralumina refinery in Sardinia, one of the poorest parts of Italy (145). Until 1987, it had aluminium fabricating facilities, not only in New Zealand and Japan, but also in Hong Kong, Madagascar, the Phillipines and Indonesia (207).
Comalco launched itself publicly in 1970, with a share issue which left CRA and Kaiser holding 45% each of the company's equity, and the Australian "public" the remaining 10%. Just how the "public" got this foot in the aluminium door- and how "public" the share issue really was - is a tale-and-a-half (208).
The enormous profiteering which characterised the share issue was the result of a carefully-managed media "hype", and the placing of "unsecured notes" to several Australian institutions which later gained them shares at a privileged price. This brought in Australian Mutual Provident (AMP), Anglo-American nominees, other insurance companies, and the ANZ Bank (200). Excitement generated around the wealth locked into Weipa ensured that, on the day of issue, the share price of A$2.75 (fully paid-up by the early buyers), shot up to A$5.80 and closed at A$5.60 - thus representing a capital gain in a few hours of more than 100%. Even bigger profits were made by CRA and Kaiser (around 1000%) (200, 209).
The ordinary Australian shareholders made considerably less, however - they had forked out nearly four times as much as the companies for the same shares. Those Australians who really made a killing that day were the select band that had been offered shares before the day of issue. These "trade customers" were essentially buddies of Comalco in high office in Queensland (and a few elsewhere). "... We expanded our usual list [of share recipients] to include people who've said over the years they'd like to have a chance to buy any new shares we float", Comalco blandly explained the day before the issue (210).
Such people included the Queensland State Treasurer and Acting Premier, Gordon Chalk, and his family; the Ministers of Aboriginal Affairs, Industrial Development, Works, Local Government and Electricity, Health; and the Premier of Western Australia.
While it was said of Acting-Premier Chalk's family that the only member who had not accepted shares was "the dog" (200), none of the Aboriginal community at Weipa got a look-in (let alone the dogs!). (The Queensland director of Aboriginal and Island Affairs took up 40,000 shares, "on behalf of " the 50,000 people under his protection, and 38 Aboriginal people working for the company got a small entitlement.) The Australian Financial Review forbade its staff to have any part in the deal; the Federal Prime Minister rejected the offer; and the Premier of South Australia, Don Dunstan, called the scheme "highly improper". However, the Presbyterian church in Melbourne, and the Anglican church in Melbourne and Sydney, accepted shares. Joh Bjelke-Peterson, a great friend of the company, and shortly to become Premier of Queensland, took up only 5 shares, but his wife later acquired 500. (A few years afterwards, the Australian Senate Select Committee on Foreign Ownership and Control of Australian Resources would find that Queensland was "the only state for which both foreign ownership and control exceeded 50 per cent" - and it was the highest in both categories!) (211).
By the late 1970s, Comalco was Australia's leading exporter of bauxite and, with a world recovery in aluminium, it embarked on an A$80 million expansion programme which necessitated a 12% increase in mining at Andoom and Weipa (212) . Production of calcined bauxite - which it first produced in 1970 - had already given Comalco half the world market (212).
In 1982, Kaiser had had its fill of Comalco, and wanted out (213). Not, however, before some of its Weipa bauxite found its way into B-52 bombers and others used in massive raids on civilians in Vietnam: many of these planes were shot down by the North Vietnamese army and the National Liberation Front and thereby recycled (200)! Kaiser sold its share of the company to CRA and AMP. CRA then came to hold 70.3%, and AMP 16.5% (214). However, CRA sold-on some 16 million of its holding to Australian investors, thus marginally reducing its control (215).
Within the next few years Comalco, like its parent CRA, was to concentrate on consolidating, expanding and controlling downstream activities and attracting new markets, as its major corporate strategy for the eighties (4). To this end, it bought 50% in Showa Aluminium Industries KK (SAL) in late 1982. Showa was a company with which Comalco had a long association, having equity in a small smelter at Kitakata, a refinery and various aluminium products. SAL had also acquired a 20.65% interest in the Tiwai Point smelter. (Showa Denko was one of the two Japanese companies culpably responsible for the mercury poisoning, known universally as Minamata disease, which killed and maimed thousands of people from the 1950s onwards (216). But, of course, Comalco was little concerned with such moral niceties: it had, after all, discussed co-financing Weipa with the Nazi war criminal, Baron von Krupp, thirty years earlier) (200, 216).
The flirtation with Showa Denko gave Comalco an unprecedented entree into Japan (217). But SAL was not as efficiently ruthless (ruthlessly efficient?) as its weightier partner and, after a dispute between Comalco and SAL over methods of restructuring in 1985 (218), the "Australian" company pulled out of the partnership (4). This was to cost Comalco much of its expected profits that year (219) though, in return, Comalco got back SAL's share of Tiwai, thus increasing its control over the controversial smelter, to 79.4% (220).
The following year Comalco also sold a number of businesses world-wide, including Chiap Hua Comalco, Comalco (Asia), Federal Aluminium, Hooven Comalco, and its operations in Indonesia - PT Indo Extrusions (221). Meanwhile, the company had been chalking up a five-fold rise in profits for 1983, expanding Tiwai Point again, and starting up the Boyne Island smelter (222).
In early 1985, CRA effected something of a coup, by buying into the aluminium operations of Martin Marietta in the USA. (Martin Marietta is one of the world's biggest defence contractors - Comalco certainly knows how to select its partners!). The following year a new kaolin plant was opened at Weipa, thus sacrificing even more Aboriginal subsoil (the kaolin lies under the bauxite), in a quest to "capture a major share of markets in the Asia-Pacific region" (223). In less than a year the operation was proving successful (224).
1988 saw record profits for the company, again because of reduced income tax, high prices for aluminium, and a small rise in output (225). The "mere" fact that Comalco's New Zealand's accounts are maintained in US dollars, and not NZ dollars, meant a profit increase of US$22.3 million (226). Further expansion and upgrading - to the tune of A$ 1 billion - was also announced (227).
A few months later, in a spring-clean of top management structure announced by CRA (228, 229), Mark Rayner moved from Comalco to become CRA's head of financial and strategic planning- only a step from the shoes of current chief executive John Ralph (230). (Interestingly too, as part of the shake-up, CRA's head of exploration moved northwards to become RTZ's head of exploration: so much, once again, for the pretence that CRA is managerially quite separate from its parent) (229).
Comalco has entered the 1990s with a lot of self-confidence (some would call it conceit), although Mark Rayner himself has predicted that the aluminium industry will enter a "trough by 1992". Despite some disastrous overseas exploits, the company has recently considered opening an alumina refinery and smelter in the USSR. It also put its support behind a proposal with BHP, the discredited Bond Corp, and the Martin Marietta Corp, to build a space launch centre at Cape York (230), which it saw as a means of "improving the availability of its Weipa bauxite operations" - although it may be guessed what such a disastrous innovation would have on the land, culture and lifestyles of the Mapoon, Aurukun and Weipa Aboriginal people. (In 1990, Comalco pulled out of this extravaganza).
For more than thirty years Comalco has been able to convince a large number of Australians that it serves the interests of"the nation" (whatever, on closer scrutiny, these can be said to be). Forgotten are the stratagems by which it seized Aboriginal land and broke up one of the longest-surviving black communities in the country; destroyed Australia's only public initiative at forming a rational and controlled bauxite industry; resisted, tooth-and-claw, attempts to ensure "added value" to its mining, by processing in Australia, rather than overseas (until the pressures became too great to resist, and the structure of the world market itself dictated the location of plant closer to both mine and consumers) (232). Forgotten are the ways in which it ensured that the interests of its corporate backers (specifically CRA/RTZ) would be served at the expense of Australian taxpayers and more commonplace investors; the manner by which it polluted and devastated natural environments, in a chain that stretches around the world.
Cape York's are not the only bauxite deposits on Aboriginal traditional land that have been the subject of intense interest by CRA or Comalco. In 1965, Amax lay claim to massive bauxite deposits on Mitchell Plateau, in the far north of the Kimberleys of Western Australia (minimum of 200 million tonnes) (46), and nearby at Cape Bougainville (around a thousand million tonnes). Three years later the company built a beneficiation plant and tested bulk samples. In 1969, the Western Australian Minister of Mines (then Charles Court, who was later to be state Premier at the time of Noonkanbah - see Amax) gave Amax a 1500 square mile lease. The company made plans to build a town, port and refinery. Twenty seven square miles were also excised from the Kalumburu Aboriginal reserve at Cape Bougainville, without any consultation with the Aboriginal owners, or consideration of compensation (233).
However, Amax failed to raise the finance needed for such a large enterprise. In 1980, CRA bought out 52.5% of the prospect, and Alcoa bought minority shares in both Mitchell River and Cape Bougainville (46). Billiton (Royal Dutch Shell) also took 10% in Mitchell Plateau, and both Sumitomo and Marubeni secured 5% (234). By 1983, Mitchell Plateau Bauxite Ltd, managed by CRA (5), had acquired another bauxite project in Western Australia, at Muchea in the Darling Ranges, northeast of Perth. None of these prospects has moved to the construction phase - "it is difficult to get enthusiastic over what will inevitably be an expensive venture", commented Rowe and Pitman in 1982 (14). Nonetheless, exploration at Mitchell Plateau in the early 'eighties had already damaged sacred sites (235).
The controversial Tiwai Point smelter (sometimes known as Bluff, because it is situated at Bluff Harbour) is owned by New Zealand Aluminium Smelters Ltd (NZAS), which consists of Comalco NZ (owned 67% by CRA) and Sumitomo of Japan (20.6%). NZAS also has extensive downstream interests in extrusion (a 50/50 JV with Carter Holt Harvey) and fabrication. With a staff of 1750 in New Zealand mostly at the smelter - the majority of its production goes to Asia (especially Japan and Taiwan): 27 per cent of New Zealand's exports to Japan in 1988 were of Comalco aluminium (236). Tiwai: a point for alarm
The plant's existence has been marked by controversy for nearly thirty years: indeed, it could be claimed that it is the longest-running economic/environmental issue on the country's agenda.
Comalco came to New Zealand for cheap power to smelt alumina which derives mainly from the Weipa bauxite fields, and is refined at the Gladstone refinery. The lease it negotiated with the government in 1960 is a model of resource theft-by-stealth. Under the Manapouri Te-Anau Development Act of that year, Comalco undertook to build a power station to power a smelter. In return, the New Zealand government would grant the company exclusive rights, for 99 years, to use the waters of two of the country's most precious natural assets: Lakes Manapouri and Te Anau, situated in the Fiordland National Park. These lakes could be raised to a level which would just avoid flooding the Te Anau township - no less than eighty-four feet above its natural level in the case of Manapouri. Since Comalco would own the hydro scheme, the cost of power would be its own concern.
Within two years Comalco was complaining that it couldn't pay for the work necessary at Manapouri. In a 1963 agreement, the New Zealand government itself then undertook to construct Manapouri and sell the power to Comalco. The power station was designed by Bechtel, constructed by Utah Mining and Construction (both US companies) and eventually cost twice the original price (237).
What's more, Comalco would come to pay for its electricity at a far lower rate than that charged to everyone else in the country. Although still not officially revealed, this price was originally fixed at less than one fifth of one cent per unit: thirteen times less than the rate charged to New Zealand householders, and only one twentieth of that charged to the country's other industries and farmers.
By 1967, there were an unprecedented 264,906 signatures to a petition to stop the raising of the Lake. In 1972, the Labour party campaigned on a similar platform. Meanwhile, Comalco and its Japanese partners had built their smelter at Tiwai Point. In 1974, because of droughts, there were severe power cuts throughout the country: Lake Manapouri's level dropped - yet Comalco was able to take electricity from the national grid to compensate!
In 1980, the Campaign Against Foreign Control in New Zealand (CAFCINZ) - now CaSca (Campaign Against Foreign Control in Aotearoa) - published documents emanating from Comalco, which demonstrate the enormous lengths to which that corporation will go to ensure its own profitability at the expense of just about everyone else. These documents cover a range of issues surrounding the operations of the Tiwai Point smelter. Key among them is a telex dated 15/11/77 (IFB/MBB) from I F Borrie, Comalco's General Manager, Special Services, to M B Bennett, Comalco's Corporate Manager in New Zealand. This outlines crucial discussions between Prime Minister Muldoon of New Zealand and Mr Schlesinger, the United States Secretary of State for Energy. The US Secretary had been briefed on the issue of pricing by Comalco (namely by Cornell Maier President of Kaiser Aluminium and Chemical Corporation). He then sent a transcript of the meeting to the company, which used it in their battle in New Zealand to keep the power price down. Prior to this, Comalco had walked out of a governmental meeting, set up to renegotiate the power price, and Muldoon had met with Schlesinger, partly to gain his support on the Comalco "problem". Comalco's campaign against the New Zealand government involved various other ruses, including a telex sent to Lord Shackleton, deputy chair of RTZ, asking him to initiate British government action against New Zealand (238).
The upshot of these various pressures (with others which have still not been revealed), and a threat in October 1977 to close down the smelter, was that Comalco finally agreed to pay 4.5 times its previous rate (only around a quarter more than it was bargaining for) and the government retreated from the 650% increase it was insisting upon (239).
In 1979, the pricing issue still loomed large. Power from Manapouri continued to be "one of the cheapest ... in the world" (240). When Muldoon came to power in the late 1970s, he promised to better the Labour opposition in squeezing concessions from Comalco (240). Once again, however, the company came out on top: while other consumers had to suffer a 45-50% increase, the smelter sustained only a 25% price hike (241).
In 1983, despite chalking up a NZ$18.1 million loss, Comalco reported a good year (242). The following year, with Tiwai Point still paying less than 2 cents a unit, and consuming one fifth of the nation's electricity supply, the government announced a 22% price rise to NZAS (243). Comalco's Don Hibberd was appalled: it would "demoralise" the management at Tiwai Point, he claimed. New Zealand farmers were incensed: the dairy industry would continue subsidising Comalco, declared the chair of the Dairy Board, although it was earning "vastly more" for the nation than the smelter. The Coalition for Open Government also rounded on Comalco (244).
Three years later the price issue remained high on the political agenda. The government set up an Energy and Minerals Advisory Committee, soliciting public opinion on various issues, including the electricity cost to NZAS (245). The previous year, the Lange government had yet again tried to squeeze more out of its recalcitrant corporate bed-partner. Comalco reacted with its heaviest sticks. It began conducting "surveys" of top government officials (246). Japanese business men at a Japan-New Zealand business gathering in Kobe threatened a boycott on future investment in New Zealand, unless the government fell in with Comalco's desires (although this was later denied) (247).
In September, Comalco and Sumitomo filed proceedings against the government in the High Court, "to protect their rights" should the government legislate an equitable pricing deal (247).
By November, Comalco was claiming it ran at a loss, citing the closure of the Goldendale smelter in the USA as evidence of the parlous state of the industry. The following month, NZAS lost its court case: the government did indeed have the right to legislate a new power price - a 100% increase was the figure mentioned (248). As CAFCA pithily put it: "New Zealand Aluminium Smelters Ltd was not yet the New Zealand House of Lords ..." (247).
In 1987, the Prime Minister David Lange ridiculed Comalco's claim that it was losing money at Tiwai Point: the company said it had chalked up a NZ$34 million loss in the first fifteen years of the smelter's operations (249). Lange declared sarcastically how "deeply grateful" he was that Comalco had kept going, despite its deprivations, "... to service New Zealand" (249).
That year, as Comalco doubled its profits (up 192%) (250) the government promised to double its charges to Comalco (251) and made another proposal, whereby Comalco would buy out the Manapouri power station, and float some shares to the New Zealand Electricity Corporation and institutional investors (406). The Guardians of Lakes Manapouri and Te Anau were considerably alarmed: its chairman was "suspicious about the sincerity of Comalco's respect for the environmental sensitivity of Lakes Manapouri and Te Anau", and worried that Manapouri's level would be raised to supply all the power used at Tiwai Point (Manapouri supplies a majority, but not the whole amount) (247). On March 25, Comalco sought a court order preventing the government from transferring Manapouri to the new Electricity Corporation (due to be inaugurated on April 1 1987). It failed.
1988 was a record year for Comalco as a whole. (According to Australian brokers, A C Goode Ltd, its debt-to-shareholders'-funds-ratio was as low as 1:13) (251). The Energy Minister Bob Tizard complained, in early 1989, that the government was not even covering its costs in supplying power to Comalco: the company could have saved as much as NZ$200 million in the previous year (251).
Through 1988 and 1989 the possible sale of the Manapouri scheme to Comalco moved from being a nightmare impossibility to a nightmare probability. To soften the New Zealand public for the take-over, Comalco announced that it would bring all its New Zealand operations together, in a new outfit which would hold its 79.4% share of Tiwai Point. Mark Rayner of Comalco claimed that the company was "keen ... to underline its commitment to New Zealand" (252). It also set about refurbishing its tarnished public image "from a multinational sucking money out of New Zealand to that of a local company pure as spring water" (253). TV advertisements ended with the legend: "The Power of Good" - a comment which led the Secretary of CAFCA to retort (in a letter to The Listener): "Comalco's history in this country is one of deceit and arm-twisting at the highest level, threats to our environment on an unprecedented scale, dubious share deals and electricity at give-away prices" (254).
The Public Services Association accused the government of back-tracking on an undertaking not to sell off public assets (255). The Christchurch Star, the following year, exposed Comalco's attempt at "greening" its image, and at softening public opposition to the take-over proposal: "Comalco has dressed itself up in Kiwi clothes," declared the newspaper, "by establishing a New Zealand holding company with local directors ... [but] the number of New Zealand shareholders remains extremely low. It has also set up an aluminium recycling plant capitalising on an advertising campaign promoting itself as a good corporate citizen. But the company's prime concern is to ensure that the access it enjoys to cheap New Zealand power is preserved once the electricity industry is privatised" (256). According to the Christchurch Star, Comalco would go along with a proposal to take a minority share in any new company, but would require an option to increase its equity to fifty per cent later.
Meanwhile, other electricity Boards in New Zealand demanded that Manapouri be tendered to them as well, and not remain the subject of a secret deal (257). The Christchurch Star succinctly commented: "The time is long past when Comalco's power concession, retained at the expense of every other consumer, should have been removed ... any scheme that would give an overseas-based multinational concern the inside running on the purchase of such a strategically valuable asset as Manapouri has to be viewed with extreme wariness" (258).
Alumina from the Gladstone refinery in Queensland may also be smelted at the Bell Bay plant in Tasmania. This, too, has been the subject of controversy since Comalco bought the smelter from the Tasmanian and Federal Australian governments in 1961.
It was then powered by hydro-electricity gained from diverting the waters of the Great Lake, on the central plateau, into the South Esk river (259). The lake's level was raised, leaving its shores beachless and scarred with dead vegetation (44). Then, in 1969, the Tasmanian parliament - in the face of considerable opposition approved the damming of Lake Pedder, and the flooding of its surrounds, including the Gordon River gorge (260).
By the early 1980s, Bell Bay was Australia's largest aluminium smelter, turning out 112,000 tonnes a year according to Comalco, and contributing about 6% of Tasmania's gross domestic product (261) . But, although the smelter is a very minor contributor to state employment, it has accounted for around 40% of all electricity usage (260), dropping to around 25% in the late 1980s (256). Thirsty for more cheap electricity, Comalco enthusiastically supported proposals to dam the Franklin river in the early 1980s - the last major river wilderness area in south-eastern Australia. Thanks to an overwhelming national and international campaign, this proposal was eventually blocked.
As in New Zealand, the company has never revealed details of its secret agreement on power pricing. In 1981, it was suggested by the state Premier, that Comalco paid as little as 0.7 cents per kW/hour unit (260). As part of the price of gaining "#008040" support in the 1989 Tasmanian elections, the Labor party agreed to reveal details of the deal, late in 1989 (256). It still had not done so by summer the following year.
In a comprehensive study of CRA's interests, completed in 1986, the investment advisory group McIntosh, Hamson, Hoare, Govett Ltd estimated the proportion of the company's costs that went into power generation for aluminium smelting. In 1984 this was around 9% of total operating costs (4). The average electric energy cost per unit (kW/hour) "compared favourably" with industry as a whole: at 1.12 Australian cents/unit it was less than one third of the industry average (3.4 Aus cents). The Tiwai Point and Bell Bay costs were almost identical (Tiwai Point costs were slightly higher). Those at Boyne Island were the highest. (Comalco's interest in the Boyne Island smelter near the refinery at Gladstone, was 30% in 1989, but due to rise as the third and fourth potline came on-stream and the company took a higher proportion of the output) (262).
In 1988, Comalco and the Tasmanian government agreed to build an aluminium wheel-casting plant next to the Bell Bay Smelter (263), to sell automotive wheels to USA, Japan and Europe. This was vaunted by Comalco's Mark Rayner as a move which was good for Australia (264).
Pollution from Comalco's refineries and smelters has long given rise to concern. Caustic soda is dumped from Gladstone's operations in the form of an ugly red sludge. In 1974, Professor Fitzgerald summarised "some recent reports [as appearing] to suggest that the environmental impact of the refinery ... could limit the region's prospects of becoming the site for continuing industrial expansion on a scale that might justify the costs of the initial take off" (193). Also of concern are the impact of boiler ash and alumina dust. The major air pollutant is sulphur dioxide - a cause of "acid rain" - whose effects vary according to the height of the stack from which they are belched out, and prevailing winds. At maximum levels of concentration, Gladstone's emissions have been estimated as equal to the average concentrations - from all sources - in the city of Perth (200), and this, at only two-and-a-half miles radius from the plant! Smelters: a dirty footnote
Fluorides emitted from aluminium smelters are supposed to be gathered by a variety of filters, centrifuges and water spray collectors. However, more than a decade after its operations commenced, the Bell Bay smelter reportedly had no such controls whatsoever, at around half the furnaces in the plant. Deadly fumes crept up from floor level directly into the atmosphere (44, 200).
In 1989, Australian medical authorities finally caught up with US and European studies on the links between aluminium smelting and cancer. The executive director of the Asbestos and Industrial Cancer Society, Kerry Davis, declared that "at least 39" cancer deaths had occurred among workers in the industry directly as a result of the industrial processes. This was confirmed by a specialist at the Peter McCallum Cancer Hospital, Dr Cyril Minty, who also said that as many as 10% of aluminium smelter workers could be affected by "pot room asthma" (265).
Maoris at Tiwai Point have recently complained of "severe air pollution" from that smelter, and declared that "no living plant life [is to be found] in the area". In his submission on the Ngai Tahu land claim, to the government's Waitangi Tribunal, Robert Agrippa Whaitiri complained of ships from Tiwai polluting Bluff harbour (266).
CRA has kept a lower profile in New Zealand exploration compared with its rampages over Australia: possibly because of rebuffs by planning authorities. In early 1984, it became the first overseas mining company to be refused a prospecting licence by the country's Planning Tribunal. It had wanted to "investigate" part of the Victoria range in Inangahua county, by blasting, excavating, and felling trees on the slopes. Passing judgment on the company's intentions, Tribunal Chair, Judge Sheppard, said CRA had "shown little concern for the environmental effects of the proposed prospecting" and "no willingness" to minimise them. A little later, CRA's prospecting in the Reefton Area on Globe Hill, Westland, was criticised, when the. company bulldozed an area of historical importance (though not covered by the Historic Places Act) for a helicopter landing pad (267). The Nelson Planning Tribunal rejected the company's plans. Maoris take on CRA
A more significant defeat for CRA - which partly influenced the incoming Labour government of David Lange in 1984 to introduce some restraints on large-scale mining - had occurred two years earlier. Spurred by the high gold prices of 1980, CRA tried to secure an exploration licence on traditional Maori fishing grounds, at Manaia Harbour, the Hauraki gulf and the Manaia river, all on the renowned Coromandel peninsula. Concerned that these fishing grounds would be poisoned, shellfish beds destroyed, lifestyles and traditional recreational pursuits set at risk, and economic self-sufficiency jeopardised, Maori activists began organising against CRA. Not only did they lodge formal objections to the application and secure the help of four Maori MPs, they also enlisted the assistance of the New Zealand Maori Council, the Maori section of the National Council of Churches, Maori land rights campaigners, and tribes in the Hauraki gulf. The issue was widely publicised by local media, including television. Ministers were invited by Maori traditional owners to inspect the area and determine the deleterious effects which mining would have upon it. Only CRA was excluded from invitations to visit the Maori marae, lest they use it "as a public relations exercise". Links were established with non-Maori organisations and with the Aboriginal Mining Information Centre in Melbourne. AMIC (US!) attended a CRA annual general meeting in Melbourne and, to the question: "Would CRA guarantee NZ$3,000,000 to return the land to the Maori people in its natural state after mining operations ceased?" got the timeworn, derogatory response that it was "a matter for the New Zealand government" (268). Although the campaign did not secure recognition of Maori land rights and exclusive use of their traditional territory under the Mining Act, the campaign was partly successful: CRA withdrew its application (269).
Of course CRA has had other intentions to explore, and if possible mine, in New Zealand. (In 1982 it held the largest amount of leases under application of any company, at Golden Bay, a heavy mineralised dairy and forestry, fishing, mining and tourist area in North West Nelson. It had also built a heli-pad and carried out drilling and line-cutting) (269). A later clash between the company and local farmers and conservationists occurred in 1988 in Cobb Valley and the Mount Arthur Tableland. CRA claimed that any mining would be "insignificant" - its usual threadbare "defence". The local organisation NAPSAC (Nelson Area Parks Action Committee) launched a national petition against the project - the Wharepapa Declaration - calling for the whole of North West Nelson Conservation Park to be closed to mining.
In 1991 CRA announced that it was pulling out of New Zealand exploration.
Australia is the world's leading exporter of coal. Not surprisingly, CRA has also been involved in producing both coking and steaming coal, though its contribution to the national effort has not been as substantial as it might have liked. (In 1986 CRA produced around 6 million tonnes, while Australia as a whole exported 92 million tonnes) (8). Black and gold
Like other producers, CRA has had to suffer the effects of gross over-supply in the world market (270), and price cuts demanded by Japanese customers: in 1986, for example, it had to drop its price by around 10% (8). Also, like other producers, it has fallen foul of the unions, as it cut real wages and tried to boost productivity (8, 271).
However, early in 1989, CRA scored a coup by arranging new three-year sales with Japanese consumers, worth nearly one hundred million dollars (US$96 million) (272). This arrangement followed the federal Australian government giving approval for the controversial export of coking coal to Japan: controversial, because the currency movement left the Japanese better off than the Australians (273).
CRA's wholly-owned subsidiary Kembla Coal and Coke (KCC) runs underground mines in the Illawarra region south of Sydney (NSW), producing coking coal and some coke (4). KCC's Coal Cliff mine was at the point of closure in 1986 (4), but Coal Cliff Collieries Pty Ltd itself has an 80% interest in the Vickery JV at Gunnedah (NSW) (4). CRA has a 50.2% interest in the sulphur-steaming coal project at Blair Athol, Central Queensland, run by Pacific Coal (5). This is CRA's biggest coal project, in Australia to date - producing around 5 million tonnes, but capable of putting out 8 million tonnes a year (4).
The Tarong Coal project (in ex-Premier Joh Bjelke-Peterson's constituency in south-east Queensland) is an open-pit mine, with considerable reserves of steaming coal, and an assured contract to supply fuel for a state-owned power station (4, 14).
This bland recital of CRA's coal interests should not suggest that (for once) we have entered a non-controversial sphere of the company's operations. On the contrary, CRA's underhand attempts to take over AAR and CAIL (Coal and Allied Industries) in the 1970s, were among the more outrageous of RTZ/CRA's ploys to seize a lion's share of the nation's resources (see above). Controversy over coal
In 1980, CRA - along with the Victorian State Electricity Commission and other companies incensed farmers, and others in the state, when it investigated the Latrobe Valley for brown coal and other deposits. A leaked Task Force report declared that this region could become "the most intensive energy producing area in the world thanks to its extensive deposits". The environmentalist magazine, Chain Reaction, predicted that the project could "destroy the entire La Trobe valley" (274). Undeterred by the criticisms, in 1981 CRAE stepped up its investigations of the deposit and also into the Murray Basin. Roderick Carnegie, the company's chair, waxed lyrical about the region's potential for coal-fire electric power, managed by CRA and possibly fuelling a chemicals industry - so long as the coal's high (50-60% weight) water content could be removed (275). (In 1988, CRA and Melbourne University started work on a project to turn lignite into smokeless fuel, by removing its 60% moisture content) (276).
In the last couple of years, echoes of the Latrobe controversy have been heard in the far west of Australia, where (along with Barrack Energy) CRA has proposed to deep-cut for coal in a proposed National Park, and either sell it to industrial users, or use it to fuel a A$1 million power station - possibly for a pulp mill (277). Known as the Hill River project, CRA's plans to exploit this deposit were quite advanced by 1989 (278). So, however, were strident objections to the whole scheme. One of Australia's leading conservation organisations, the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) (279), pointed out that the area, Mount Lesueur, contains over 800 plant species alone: perhaps 10% of the total native species in the state.
CRA blandly asserted that it is aware of the botanical importance of Mount Lesueur and is intent on ensuring "environmentally responsible development" (280). But, once again, CRA put its money on a potentially disastrous chain of consequences: destruction of part of a unique eco-region, the logging of thousands of trees, and the construction of a coal-fired power station, possibly for a highly dubious woodchip plant: thus, at a stroke, contributing both to the greenhouse effect and other atmospheric pollution.
But Australia is no longer necessarily regarded as the best bet for international coal supplies (281). In any case, where cheap sources of coal are concerned, CRA has already "picked a plum" in a part of the world where environmental consciousness is weak (though rising), labour is cheap, and national legislation strongly favours the multinational at the expense of smaller, indigenous developments: Indonesia.
CRA has long been deeply involved in Indonesia: as already pointed out, Comalco located some of its plant there in the early years of its bauxite exploitation. In 1975, the Indonesian regime proposed leasing one million hectares of West Papua (Irian Jaya) to the company for a large-scale integrated scheme, combining logging, timber, plywood, veneer, woodchip and pulp production (282). This project never materialised. In Indonesia
On the island of Kalimantan (formerly Borneo), CRA holds a half share in Indonesia's largest new coal mine, the Kaltim Prima: indeed it is likely to become the largest mine in the country, apart from the state-owned Bukit Asam coal mine, owned by PT Batubara (8). Output from Blair Athol, and the Kalimantan mine could soon make Pacific Coal, Australia's largest producer of steaming coal (283, 355).
Situated in the Samarinda district of East Kalimantan, only 20km from the coast, the Sangatta (Sengatta) coal mine is owned 50/50 by CRA and BP. Although, in 1989, BP announced the sale of its world-wide coal interest (and CRA was mooted as a possible buyer for the non-South African mines) (284), BP has held on to its share of this particular mine "for local reasons" (285) . Kaltim Prima has coal reserves of at least 360 million tonnes - just under a quarter of Kalimantan's total reserves (286) - of which around a quarter is recoverable by open-cut methods (287). It is a "premium fuel with high calorific value and low sulphur" (287). Test production at the mine started in late 1988, commercial production in 1991, and is