Episode 3 (Australia, Part 3 of 4)

The transcript of this episode is available at Buzzsprout.com/1970784.
For photos of the places discussed, see greatmirror.com

Transcript

I was tired when I arrived in Broken Hill.  I was disoriented, too, because although the streets are laid out in a grid, which is helpful, the grid isn’t oriented to the compass points.  Instead, it lines up with mine tailings that stretch in a straight line for two miles, roughly from the northeast to the southwest.  This artificial mountain, about 200 feet high, is usually in sight, and I learned to get around town using it as my guiding star.   I suppose I should thank the Broken Hill Proprietary Company, which created this artificial mountain before leaving town in 1939.  By then, the company–usually known, then as now, simply as BHP–had carted off 5,800 tons of silver, 600,000 tons of zinc, and 1.3 million tons of lead.  It left behind some scraps for smaller companies, and two of them were still at work when I came by.  As granny used to say, fill your boots. 

The town’s street names didn’t help much, either, because instead of 1st crossing A and 5th crossing E, Broken Hill has Bromide crossing Cobalt and Mica crossing Sulphide.  I like the names.  Someone had a sense of humor, but the names don’t help visitors trying to find their way around.

Broken Hill’s main street is called Argent for the very good reason that there was enough silver here to make Broken Hill in 1900 the second city of New South Wales.  That’s why at the corner of Argent and Chloride there’s a grand old post office with a fine clocktower.  It’s next door to the Italianate facade of the old town hall.  The rest of the building was torn down in 1974, but the facade was kept and now screens a parking lot.  Good news: parking’s free.

What was the town to do?  Forty years after BHP lumbered off in search of a fresh terrestrial buffet, the city had lost half its residents.  Consultants arrived, and Broken Hill became the first town to be listed on Australia’s National Heritage List.  Not a bad idea.  Iron verandas were restored and sometimes added to old buildings that had never had them.  An old hardware store once specializing in mine equipment became an art gallery.  Downtown street corners got signs with historic photographs so visitors could compare then and now.  “Then” was generally busier than “now,” especially with streetcars in the old days pulled by tiny steam engines.  One of the nicer homes in town belonged to the system manager.  It’s still there, looking a bit like a train station itself.  

I found the bus station now with a tourist-information desk staffed by helpful volunteers, though nobody was old enough to remember BHP.  The company is still huge of course–it’s a global player, as journalists like to say.  It just doesn’t play in Broken Hill.  Worse, its legal name has been reduced to initials, and I bet there are engineers working for BHP in Chile and Canada who have no idea what the letters stand for.

Still, as I said, mining isn’t completely dead in Broken Hill.  The ore body under the tailing heap was shaped like a boomerang standing on its points.  BHP worked the central section, where the ore body was closest to the surface.   The deep ends of the boomerang were worked when I came by Chinese-owned Perilya and Japanese-owned CBH.  Just before I arrived, Perilya laid off a hundred workers.  In 2020, CBH laid off seventy.  Would those miners take issue with me  if I said that the bosses saw them the way plumbers see pipe?  I don’t think so.

I stopped by the Perilya Mine, which is at the southwest end of the tailings pile and where, each morning, a hundred men descend a mile in a cage hanging on a cable strung over a headframe as tall as a container-port gantry.  Other men enter the mine in electric vehicles that zigzag down past the mine’s twenty-six levels.  Blasting takes place at night, and the men come back in the morning to load broken rock.  The hoist that lowered men at the start of their shift now brings up that rock.  

I watched spoked wheels—as big as those on a stage coach—turn so slowly that the spokes weren’t a blur.  The ore saw daylight for the first time in hundreds of millions of years, then rode on a belt to the end of a boom where it fell in a black pile as symmetrical as the sand in an hourglass. It would later go to a nearby concentration mill producing a dust rich in lead and zinc.  The dust would be shipped by rail to the coast for refining, and the waste would join the still growing–the ever growing–tailings pile.                             

It was an almost bucolic scene, but I wouldn’t want to spend a day with the miners.   I say that after visiting the defunct Junction Mine, which opened in 1886 just north of the BHP mine.  The main shaft of the Junction Mine is called the Browne Shaft after Sylvester John Browne, who controlled the mine for a while.  I walked up to the hoist and touched its open-sided elevator, hardly more than a perforated bucket into which a half-dozen men squeezed before being lowered to one of a dozen levels from two hundred to sixteen hundred feet underground.  The men walked through tunnels up to two miles long to reach a working face.  A metal sign posted at the elevator still listed the signal code: one bell for stop, two for lower, three to hoist, and twelve for accident.  Tiny print at the top said, “No Liability.”  No lipstick or neckties there.                  

Close to the hoist an engine shed sat alongside a solid-rock outcrop.   A historic marker pointed out that this dark rock was the only surviving bit of the original surface of the Broken Hill.   In the days before the discovery of silver, miners dismissed the rock as “mullock,” worthless stuff.  In 1883 it became “gossan,” rock that indicates valuable ore nearby.   

That was the year Charlie Rasp came by.  Rasp was a German who came to Australia for his health.  He began working as a boundary rider for George McCullough, a British immigrant who managed the Mount Gipps Station, a sheep ranch of about half a million acres including what Rasp was apparently the first to call the Broken Hill.   McCullough had laid down the law that he’d fire any man who prospected on the job, and Rasp figured he’d be collecting his time when he went to tell McCullough that he thought he had found tin.  

To the contrary.  Within a few days Rasp and McCullough, along with five other station employees, had formed the Syndicate of Seven.  They staked six claims, each covering forty acres and all in a cluster near the apex of the ore body.  

A few months went by with disappointing results.  Then the mine’s general manager, William Jamieson, had a visitor.  In a massive company history, self-published in 1935, the Broken Hill Proprietary Company revealed what happened next:

a man named Low handed Jamieson a specimen of ore, remarking: ‘I found it near your claim.’  The stone was impregnated with silver chlorides.  Some bargaining ensued before Low consented to point out where he had found the stone.  Jamieson judged from the water-worn condition of the specimen that it had been washed down from higher on the hill.  Accompanied by a black boy, Harry Campbell, who carried a 16-lb. sledge hammer, he climbed towards the crown of the hill.  A great block smashed by the boy revealed the presence of rich chlorides.  Subsequent assays, showing over 1000 ozs. to the ton, confirmed the belief that the stone was superlatively rich.

That's a hard passage to read.  

The Syndicate floated shares for what it named the Broken Hill Proprietary Company.  Sixteen thousand shares were issued at a nominal value of twenty pounds each, with fourteen thousand of them going to the members of the syndicate.  Over the next three years, the company earned over one and a half million pounds sterling, of which more than a third was paid as dividends.  A twenty-eighth share in the company is said to have traded in 1888 for eighteen hundred pounds and to have traded ten years later for one and a half million.  In 1905, after twenty years of operation, a financial statement revealed total revenues of almost twenty-seven million pounds and dividends just shy of eight.  That’s equivalent to about a billion pounds today.

Charlie Rasp retired to Adelaide, where he married and acquired a mansion on the north side of town.  He called it Willyama, the Aboriginal name for the neighborhood of Broken Hill.  The house is still there: an estate agent recently called it “arguably the most gracious Blue Stone residence in the state with some fourteen main rooms of elegance and inherent charm.”  I imagine Charlie Rasp meeting Henry Ayers of the Monster Mine and comparing mansions.

George McCullough retired to London.  He stopped in Melbourne to see Mary Smith.  She had worked for him as his housekeeper at the Mt. Gipps Station, and in Melbourne he proposed.  She accepted.  In London, the McCulloughs moved into a mansion at 184 Queen’s Gate, a block or two from the Royal Albert Hall. They turned their home into a private museum of recent British art.  

An old photograph shows the McCulloughs sitting comfortably in a room plastered with paintings including Frederic Leighton’s “The Garden of the Hesperides,” now held by the Lady Lever Art Gallery near Liverpool. McCullough commissioned a portrait of himself by John Singer Sargent.  It’s held now by the Boston Athenaeum.

William Henry Corbould, a mining engineer who had known McCullough in Australia, dropped by.  In a memoir, Corbould recalls that at Mt. Gipps McCullough had been a “dour Scots”.  Guests, Corbould wrote, had eaten off “tin plates and tin mugs, nor was there any such thing as a tablecloth.”  The menu had been “boiled or roast mutton and a few potatoes, all washed down with tea.”   In London, by contrast, McCullough and his wife were “attended by a retinue of servants.  Then one ate off silver and not its poor relation, tin.  And McCullough was lavish in his entertainment of old friends.”  Still, the photograph of the McCulloughs in their mansion suggests that part of them remained in the back of beyond.  McCullough wears a smoking jacket but sits facing the camera with his legs extended and feet crossed as if he doesn’t give a damn if his manners offend anyone.  His wife sits with her feet on a short stool and has her hands in fists on her lap.  She looks as though she could teach the entire station crew a thing or two, including George McCullough. 

The founders of BHP were smart enough to hire the best engineers money could buy, and in 1889 they sent their manager to the United States to hire his own replacement.  He went straight to Nevada’s Comstock Lode and poached William Henry Patton, superintendent of the Consolidated Virginia Silver Mining Company, the most prolific mine on the Comstock.   Broken Hill needed a smelter manager, too, so the manager-recruiter continued to Colorado and hired H.H. Schlapp, superintendent of the Pueblo Smelting and Refining Company. 

Years later, an obituary described Patton as “an ardent lover and devoted student of physics and mechanical science… [who] always came to the front in case of an emergency.”  Arriving in Broken Hill, Patton put his knowledge to work by showing the miners how to build square-set timbering.  This was the method developed in Nevada to keep mined-out voids from collapsing: it filled the space with a framework of hollow wooden cubes that could be stacked like blocks.  Lumber for those squares came all the way from Oregon.

Schlapp, the smelter manager, was described by one of the men who worked for him in Colorado.  “There never was a squarer and better man to work for.  He was an indefatigable worker and a man of great ability, and with all that, very simple and lovable, but we had to attend to our duties conscientiously, or, in his mild way he would deliver to the sinner a lecture that was not easily forgotten.”  Born in Iowa and educated as a metallurgical engineer at the University of Freiberg, Schlapp realized that fuel costs in Broken Hill were so high that it would be better to convert the on-site smelter to a concentration mill, then ship the concentrate by rail two hundred miles west to the sea, at Port Pirie.  A new smelter could be built there to run on coal sent cheaply by sea from Newcastle, north of Sydney.

Patton fell ill after two years and was forced to return to the United States, and Schlapp retired in 1893, but both men were quickly replaced.   John Howell arrived from the United States via a mine in New Zealand and oversaw the excavation of a trench four thousand feet long and three hundred feet deep, dug not to reach ore but to lighten the weight of earth bearing down on the tunnels below.  His successor, Alexander Stewart, began the recycling of tailings rich in zinc.

The most important man in the history of BHP arrived in 1899.  He was Dutch-born Guillaume Delprat, and he came from the mines of Andalusia.  The personnel merry-go-round stopped, and Delprat stayed put for over 20 years.  A metallurgist by training, he helped develop a way for BHP to process the mine’s deep ores, which were sulfides instead of oxides.  More fundamentally, Delprat recognized that even sulfides wouldn’t last forever.  Thinking about the company’s long-term prospects, he oversaw the development of iron mines near the smelter at Port Pirie, and by 1915 the company’s main business was a steel mill back near the coal mines at Newcastle.  By the time operations at Broken Hill stopped in 1939, the Newcastle mill was thriving.  Forty years later, it, too, closed, but by then BHP was busy elsewhere.   Thank Delprat or curse him.   

I mostly thank him, because my fine old Crown Victoria P71 won’t start without twenty pounds of lead in its battery, but I also think of the Miner’s Memorial dedicated in 2002 atop the tailings pile.   It consists of a simulated tunnel made of rusted steel plates faced with large sheets of plate glass into which have been etched the names and causes of death of the eight hundred men who over the decades died in these mines.   The descriptions are laconic: “crushed by chute door,”  “suffocated,” died in “rock fall.” 

Some of the monuments in Broken Hill’s very large cemetery say a bit more.  One stone, twelve feet tall and paid for by the miners’ union, marks the grave of Horace Sterling Taylor.  The epitaph reads: “Accidentally killed at Silver Ring Mine by falling down a shaft, December 23, 1889.”  I found a newspaper obituary explaining that Taylor, who was 34 years old, slipped off a ladder and dropped one hundred and thirty feet.                                                    

The cemetery also holds the grave of a man who tried to stop a murderer at the Riverton train station.  He was Percival or “Jack” Brookfield, an immigrant from Lancashire who had spent his adolescence at sea and then come to Broken Hill as a miner.  He became active in the miners’ union and helped lead a strike in 1916 leading to a reduction of the work week to forty-four hours.  He fought against conscription and was fined for this, with an extra fine for cursing the British Empire.  

Elected to the New South Wales legislature, Brookfield supported the IWW and the Bolsheviks.  He also chanced to be at the Riverton station when a man fatally stabbed two people. Brookfield’s tombstone says that he “forfeited his life at Riverton, South Australia, on March 22nd, 1921, in a gallant effort to save the lives of others.”  The stone is a tall column with a globe at the top and the still faintly echoing phrase from those times: “Workers of the World, Unite!”  The cemetery was deserted when I came by at sunset.  A family of browsing kangaroos stopped, looked up, and waited to see who would blink first.  Don’t ever get into a blinking contest with kangaroos.  You’ll lose.