City 2: Perth, Prince of Mines

Perth: Prince of Mines

As with yesterday, first, some context.

Perth, the fourth biggest city in Australia and hence the fourth city on our list, is located smack in the middle of literally nothing.

Perth is the regional capital of the state known as Western Australia. At 976,790 square miles, Western Australia is ENORMOUS. It is the second largest state division of any country behind one of Russia’s Siberian republics, and includes a full third of the Australian continent. That includes a full 12,000 miles of coastline, and a straight-lined border on the east of 1,157 miles from south coast to north.

The place is almost mind-bogglingly big.

And, like South Australia, the vast majority of of it is desert.

This map shows a breakdown of the climate types found in western Australia. Aside from the monsoonal savannah of the Kimberley in the rugged north, and the wedge of warm-temperate Mediterranean climate in the southwest corner, the vast majority of the state is hot, dry desert.

But what this vast desert state lacks in vegetation, it more than makes up for in another, far more glittery element: minerals.

MINERALS EVERYWHERE.

Even the overlying soils, infertile and ancient and intensely laterized, can be mined for their mineral deposits.

And Western Australia knows it. The state produces billions. Upon billions. Upon billions of dollars worth of mineral extracts.

Despite having only a 1/3 of Australia’s land area, and only a few percent of its population, Western Australia accounts for 46% of Australia’s total exports and 58% of its total mineral export value. We’re not talking one or two different kinds of minerals, either. Western Australia processes 20% of the world’s aluminum and 15% of the world’s iron ore in its refineries, and provides huge amounts of petroleum products, nickel, and gold to the world economy. Diamonds are mined in the Kimberly, gold near Kalgoorlie.

And, though the percentage of arable land is low (only around 7% of the total land is used for crops) one must realize that 7% of the land area of a state as large as western Australia makes for a huge chunk: almost 70,000 square miles worth of land put into growing crops. Unlike South Australia, there’s no sharp line dividing fertile from infertile. A small area of the southwest coastal experiences a high rate of rainfall, and to the northeast the vegetation and farms slowly fade into the deserts of the center of the state. This transition area, appropriately named the Wheatbelt, incorporates nearly 60,000 square miles (for reference, that’s the same size as Georgia.) Some of the drier regions support large cattle and sheep stations, while the wetter regions support the growing of citrus and apples, providing another several billion in exports.

The southwest supports large forests, transitioning gradually through the wheatbelt into the desert.

In addition to this agricultural richness, thanks to the offshore currents that also support the world’s most southerly coral reefs, Western Australia’s fisheries contribute millions more dollars to the economy. With areas of natural beauty such as the Great Western Woodland, the largest intact temperate woodland left in the world, the region also experiences hundreds of thousands of tourists each year.

The Great Western Woodland? It's the region outlined in yellow. The whole thing is bigger than England and Wales combined. Big woodland. Big country.

Smack in the middle of this economic paroxysm?

Perth.

Having a population of just over two million, the Perth area contains almost 80% of Western Australia’s people. With its seaport at Fremantle, grain docks and refinery at Kwinana and nestled in a web of highways, railroads and pipelines, Perth is the center of this huge and enormously productive region.

The Swan River Colony

Perhaps not surprisingly, Perth began as a way of keeping the French out. Acting on fears that the French intended to establish a colony in this portion of the Australian continent, the British under the colonial authority Sir George Murray established the Swan River Colony in 1829, first at the port city of Fremantle, and later at the site of Perth itself, named for the Scottish city from which Sir George Murray hailed. The first settlers arrived at the Swan River in June of that year.

Unlike Adelaide, the local Aboriginal people, known amongst themselves as the Noongar, had not been ravaged by disease, and naturally did not take kindly to these new intruders digging their plows into their home soil. The area, known to the local inhabitants as Boorloo, began filling with settlers, dispossessing them of their lands and demanding they submit to English law. Conflicts over land-use practices, such as the aboriginal people burning the bush and often the fields of new settlers with it, developed into full-scale conflicts that culminated in a massacre at Pinjarra with the deaths of dozens to hundreds of the Aboriginal tribe.

After that point, colonial Perth continued to develop very slowly. The land was difficult to cultivate, and after 15 years the colony had only reached about 6,000 in number. The shortage of labor lead to Western Australia’s choice to shift from being a free colony to a convict colony, the last in Australia, with the imported convict labor constructing many of its first substantial buildings and infrastructure. By 1881, however, the colony remained small, at only 8,500 people.

The Gold Rush

Then, people found gold. My, how finding gold always seems to change things. Not always for the better, but change things it does.

In 1893, a prospector discovered 100 ounces of gold near the place now called Kalgoorlie, 370 miles east of Perth. By 1901, the city had 61,000 people.

The 1960’s saw a further boom in mining that transformed Perth into a service center for the proliferation of productive mines from which it draws most of its wealth into the current time.

The story of Perth is the story of Western Australia, and the story of Western Australia is mining. Behold, Perth, the Prince of Mines!

If there was a Prince of Mines and he had a crown, what would it be made of? I vote a huge chunk of unprocessed ore as the centerpiece.