Industrial Tour- Part 3

The third part of the trip was up into the central part of South Australia to see the BHP Olympic Dam mining and refining centre. This strictly doesn't count as "The Outback". The Outback is defined as anywhere north of the Dingo Fence, erected to keep the dingos out of pastoral land to the south. At our furthest north, we were still 200km short of this point.

The first part of the journey was back to Port Augusta. In addition to the power station, it also acts as something of a tranport terminus. The South-North railway starts in Adelaide, passes through Port Ausgusta and then runs north to Alice Springs and Darwin. It is known as "The 'Ghan" because in the 19th century Afghan labourers were imported to handle the transport of railway building materials. If any remained, they are now presumably completely merged into the Australian population. After construction was finished, their camels were released in the middle of the desert on the grounds that conditions were so harsh they couldn't possibly survive in the wild. In fact, of course, they survived very well and in the last century a business grew up in which wild camels in the outback were caught, broken and exported to the Middle East.

One sees articulated lorries anywhere in Australia. Once north of Port Adelaide they are allowed to add a third trailer and become "Road Trains." They are formidable units and one needs to keep an eye open on the road, for this if no other reason.

The road can be a bit hypnotic- mosly die-straight. No Romans here (as far as is known), but the Roman road-builder's motto "Straight is great. Curvy is pervy." certainly applies.

The occasional bend comes as something of a novelty.

If you look at a satellite photomosaic of Australia, you see a greener area curving north from the head of the Spencer Gulf, obviously caused by a wetter microclimate. It's not that wet- this is it after almost unprecedented rainfall. It's mostly, I understand, Mulga bush.

However, as you go north it gets drier......

And drier. This all still, by the way, counts as productive pastoral land.

There are many "lakes" shown on the map. They may well have been lakes in the geological past, but are now flat clay-pans. The apparent water seen here in the distance is mirage.

We passed through Woomera (of which more later) and headed off the main road to a settlement called Roxby Downs. It exists in its present form because of the mining works a little to the north called Olympic Dam (after an irrigation unit completed at the same time as the 1956 Olympics.) The road continues another 200km or so to an opal mining settlement called Aramooka and ends there.

Roxby is a perfect piece of Australian suburbia transplanted to the middle of the desert. The building is the shopping mall.

In the middle of so much emptiness, it's a shock to see the processing plant at Olympic Dam rearing into sight over the horizon. The main product by weight is copper, but they extract zinc, cadmium, gold, silver and uranium as well. The number of stages in the processing is staggering. Some of them are thermal- huge combustion-fired or electrical furnaces- but many are "wet" processing. Some of the countercurrent washing stages are huge- settlers 100m in diameter and 5-6 of them in series.

The staff are accommodated in a camp and we stayed there as well. It's all rather North Sea- the cabins are basically sections of containers but very well fitted out inside. There is a sleeping cabin and a shower which is about the same size, and very much needed in that climate. The working day is about 6am-8pm for the graduate staff, but compensated by frequent periods of leave long enough to go to Adelaide or other centers of more normal life. The self-service catering is North Sea as well- 24 hour, lavish, very well cooked and with facilities to make one's own packed lunch. Because of the shift system adjacent tables will have people eating breakfast and their evening meal. One difference form the North Sea is that the camp isn't dry. I suppose human nature can be pushed only so far.

All this activity, industrial and human, is a major strain on the environment. Thinking just about water, huge quantities are required- imagine the evaporative losses from all those settlers in that climate. The workforce also needs a lot of water. We were there in the depth of winter and it didn't feel hot (damn cold at night, in fact- when we arrived the younger graduates put on an outdoor barbecue. Very nice and lavish, but it was absolutely freezing) but the plant tour left everyone with a raging thirst. At the debriefing the company handed out bottled water and everyone soaked up at least a litre. At present it is taken from artesian bores, but the effect on the great water table is perceptible. This underlies all of central Australia but the renewal rate is low- the residence time for subterranean water is measured in tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. There are plans to supplement this and allow for expansion by siting a desalination plant at the head of the Spencer Gulf and piping the water to Olympic Dam. However, the locals there are up in arms about this, believing, plausibly, that the tidal scour there is so poor that the salinity of the water will be changed and affect their fishing catches.

On the way back, at my urging, we had a detour into Woomera. Anyone much under 60 probably needs an explanation. In the 1940-60s, when Britain and the Commonwealth had a missile and space programme, this was where all the testing was done. One impressive fact is that the town, workshops, airport, ranges and target area were all within the boundaries of one sheep station, Arcoona. Woomera is still used for some such purposes but the population can't be more than 10% of what it was at its height. A real ghost town. More recently it was used as a detention centre for illegal asylum-seeekers, on the more or less explicit grounds that they should be discouraged from arriving in the first place. The driver of our coach had done a lot of transport for this programme and had a rather hard view of these individuals. In his experience they were mostly well-qualified and well-off, and were furious because they had paid a lot of money to traffickers to get them into Australia, only to be among the few percent that were caught. With the fall of the Howard government and the Rudd administration, these harsh measures have been, at least in theory, dropped (they now take them to Christmas Island, which is probably no better.) Significantly, the number of boats intercepted in the Timor Sea has shot up in recent weeks.

There is a glorious static park in the middle of town with samples of the kit that had been tested locally. I hopped off and took some photographs- a bit infantile but for me definitely a step back to the time when every schoolboy was obsessed with the whole field.

We spent so much time on this that we didn't have time for our last port of call- a gas stabilisation plant at Port Bonython. It can just be seen across the gulf from Whyalla on this photograph. It was no particular loss to me- it can't be very different from Shell Mossmorran. But the students don't get too much exposure to more traditional Chemical Engineering and it was a pity they missed it.

I can't conclude this particular part of the blog without expressing my thanks to Dr David Lewis, who organised the trip this year. The job is not too popular and is assigned on a Buggins-turn basis, but might be better if one person handled it for two or three years running. There would probably have to be some substantial academic payoff for this to avoid people feeling put-upon, though.

Anyway, David did a splendid job and I'm grateful to him for allowing me and Liz on the trip. It was a slightly odd feeling when the bus drew to a halt and someone else got out and headed for the gatehouse, but it was nice to sit back and let someone else take the strain!