Doray Minerals have several gold exploration sites just up the highway, about 45 km out of town - I bought about $3500 worth of shares a few months ago, an amount which would probably buy half a drill rig tyre. It's exciting to drive past and admire my half tyre as it works hard among the sample bags and trucks - the Wilber Lode & Andy Well sites are literally right next to the highway. They just announced another upgrade this morning; it's a big deposit and just keeps getting better. The shire have approved the mining "village" (camp) to be built across the highway from me behind the old cinema, but so far all that's there are flouro site markers and a few drunk Wiluna mob sleeping in wrecked cars.
As many of you have probably heard on the news, there's a lot of debate at the moment about how people are employed at mine sites in Australia and how the whole industry affects local communities. Living in the thick of it, even though we are small & quiet compared to the super-pit projects in the Pilbara and Bowen/Surat Basins, gives you a day to day experience of the issues and I wonder what the hell the government is thinking.
You may have heard of "FIFO" - Fly In Fly Out - employment. Mine employees work for three weeks straight, then have a week off, during which they fly home until the next three week stint starts. At the mine site, they live in purpose-built mine camps or "villages" as the companies like to call them, doing twelve hour shifts each day. Life in a mine camp is very controlled - there are dress codes at all times, you can only buy beer etc at certain times, you have to eat at the scheduled canteen times, and there is constant drug & alcohol testing. Ian told me a lot about it; it sounds pretty much like being in prison. For many people, their week off is eaten up with the actual travel time - it can take a full day or longer to get home. The big mines have their own airports and flight services, but you're still many hours in the air and on the road to get from the remote camps to your home. So that might leave you with maybe 4 or 5 actual days off, during which you're pretty knackered.
Because of this, it's hard for the mines to attract people with families; obviously there are no facilities at the camps for children to attend school etc, and accommodation in any local towns is almost impossible due to the huge numbers of workers. The mine site itself is often many kilometres from a town and has very tight security, so commuting generally doesn't appeal to either the company or the workers.
So what you get are huge numbers of single people, mostly men in their twenties, living on site, where goods and services are brought in rather than sourced from the local area. In towns where accommodation is found for workers, the companies tend to buy properties, knock down the homes, and build single-person unit accommodation. This means that towns are then filled with hundreds or even thousands of single people, mostly blokes, and the hospital and other services become overwhelmed, to the detriment of locals. Contrary to what you would expect, mine workers don't generally get their supplies in town but are provided with meals etc at the mine site. So lots of shops close down; those that are open can't offer the same wages to the local people as the mines do, so they find it hard or impossible to find employees.
It's going to lead to huge social damage. Australia already has a massive suicide rate among rural men for one thing, and the mining camp structure is really busting up small towns. On these kinds of shifts, isolated from normal social contact, how are people to form relationships or families? Already there are big increases in alcohol abuse, suicide, relationship breakdown, all that stuff. It fractures not just the local towns and the workers on site, but the communities they come from, from which they are absent. People aren't able to engage in their community either locally or where they come from, and you have all these families where one partner is away all the time.
But we all want our shares to go up in value so we can make bazillions of dollars. The mining taxes will pay for government programs to help with the depression, alcohol dependency and relationship failures, and all the workers can one day go back to the city to sit alone and tired in their hard-earned suburban McMansion with a really big TV. So, you blokes stop complaining, and just keep diggin' up that gold.
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