I haven't read the book, but my impression is that the blurb understates the extent of Australian mining industry 1900-1960. Certainly gold went into a long decline, and there was a distinct drop in base metal mining when prices fell in the 1920s and 30s, but places like Mount Isa and Broken Hill continued production without interruption through those decades. Iron ore was shipped from Iron Knob in the Middleback Ranges of South Australia in the 1920s, and from Yampi Sound in Western Australia from the 1950s. Certainly there was an upswing from the early 1960s, when Lang Hancock in Western Australia and Leslie Thiess in Queensland (among many others) recognised and successfully exploited the booming Japanese market for iron ore and coking coal, creating the vastly greater export trade of recent decades.
Iron ore was being mined at Iron Knob from the late nineteenth century, at first as flux for the Port Pirie silver-lead smelters, but was being sent to Newcastle and Port Kembla for steel-making from the 1920s, and was being exported to Japan and other countries in the 1930s. Controversy over exports to Japan wasn't reported in terms of concern for domestic supplies of a scarce commodity at the time, but was based on strategic doubts about the war in China, rising Japanese aggression and the wisdom of supplying essential commodities to a country that might soon be at war with Australia.
See <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/160843235>, <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/108402863> and <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/144269297>
Peter Bell
> On 18 Sep 2016, at 3:35 pm, Tony Brewis <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> What I was trying to imply in my previous post, but left unsaid, was the
> reason behind the initiation of the "Second Rush" in mining in Australia. As
> the write-up on the book in the website we have been sent by Peter says:
>
>
>
> "The Second Rush is a history of the minerals boom in Australia over the
> half-century from the early 1960s to the end of the China minerals boom in
> 2012. The earlier substantial mining boom-the gold rush of the nineteenth
> century-created extraordinary prosperity. However, from 1901 to the 1950s,
> with a few exceptions, mining descended into the doldrums. In the 1940s
> mining was regarded as belonging to Australia's past and not to its future.
> The "Second Rush" began unexpectedly from the 1960s with the development of
> new export industries, the most prominent being coal, iron ore and bauxite."
>
>
>
> I think, and was trying to illustrate, that the "unexpected beginning" was,
> at least in part, initiated by Lang Hancock when on a trip south in 1952
> flying his Auster light aircraft he is said to have made in bad weather
> (including low clouds) which made him fly at low altitude over the
> Hammersley range. During this he noticed the red colour of the rocks, which
> induced him to go back later with a geologist and investigate. In a time
> when, as I mentioned, Australia had a ban on the export of iron ore because
> they thought they had few deposits, it was a significant discovery, finding
> in effect a whole mountain range rich in iron ore which had been "unknown"
> until that date (despite the report of the man in 1880 that "gold is
> difficult to find because there is so much iron oxide").
>
>
>
> I think this discovery made people wonder "If we have that huge amount of
> iron ore that we didn't realise we had, what else might there be?", and that
> this initiated a widespread increase in geological exploration which led to
> The Second Rush described in the book.
>
>
>
> As I mentioned, a geological map on sale in Sydney up to the end of 1968 (I
> said I went in 1969, but since that post I have realised it was actually
> December 1968) showed nothing of the iron ore in the northern part of
> Western Australia. It was only as late as 1968 that new maps were being
> printed, catching up with some of the new discoveries.
>
>
>
> Tony Brewis
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>
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