ROYCE KURMELOVS Boom and Bust: The rise and fall of the mining industry, greed and the impact on everyday Australians. Reviewed by Kurt Johnson
Royce Kurmelovs shines a light on recent history, exploring the personal stories of those directly involved in mining and the wider impacts of the industry in Australia.
You would be hard pressed to find an Australian who has not invested in mining. Some have bought shares and follow their stocks’ rise and fall like a dog at the track, others are involved without realising it, through passive investments like super funds.
Yet in the popular Australian mind the boom remains undiscussed and unimagined – a vast middle space between mining equipment silhouetted against the sky and the nightly finance news reporting the daily iron ore price. In Boom and Bust, Royce Kurmelovs sets about sketching out this space.
His formula, as for his first two books, The Death of Holden and Rogue Nation, is to explore his subject through a series of character profiles. It’s a formula with a triple payoff. First we learn about the people: the billionaire mining magnate, the Indigenous land-rights activist, the self-destructive FIFO worker, the arrogant state premier, the environmentalist and the startup entrepreneur. Then we learn about their worlds – cut-throat high finance, Indigenous land rights struggles, WA state politics, environmental activism, the startup business scene. Finally we step back and the mosaic is furnished with another tile, and we see the mining boom for what it is – a giant interconnected network of humanity with each node chasing something: money, power or escape.
The formula is tightly economic – you learn a lot by only reading a little. It’s also compelling. Over time Kurmelovs has mastered profile-writing and he is able to extract the character, the history and the world of his subjects in an easy, expansive style, conversational but never condescending. But a formula it is and despite Kurmelovs’s prowess, sometimes when encountering yet another profile you feel its skeleton poking through.
Occasionally you see what is possible when Kurmelovs diverges from the self-contained profile. One chapter is on the testosterone-fuelled, single-minded mining magnate Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest. In the next, Indigenous land rights activist Michael Woodley is evoked as the uncompromising, charismatic rebel. Toward the end of the second chapter Forrest and Woodley state their opposing cases for granting unlimited access to Forrest’s Fortesque Metals Group (FMG). In a room are assembled the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation together with their rivals, the heavily FMG sponsored offshoot the Wirlu-murra Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation, come to decide on the future of their lands and a grant to FMG:
‘What we have here today is a very serious issue,’ Michael said, choosing his words carefully. ‘We have a community divided. On one part of the floor, we have a people who are willing to accept an agreement, put by you, that has no future for this [other] part of the people.’
‘That’s wrong,’ Forrest interrupted. ‘That’s completely wrong.’
‘We read your agreement, we understand your agreement and, to be frank with you, it’s crap, right?’
The dramatic tension relies on how well these characters, literally on the stage at the same time, have been rendered, and without strong profiles the end product would not be nearly as riveting. One wishes for more such moments. The author has done the work of peopling this world, it would have been good to see them interact more.
The formula is also broken when the boom’s global economic context is explained (economics is another of Kurmelovs’s strengths). In one instance he describes how the Texas oil sector responded to a downturn by creating automated drilling platforms called Iron Roughnecks:
Better yet for the company, the Iron Roughnecks took no holidays, required no salary, and never grew tired. They were cheaper and more reliable than two dozen human hands and, in just two years, it was clear the 220 000 jobs lost during the Texas oil downturn were simply never coming back.
It’s succinct and relevant but most importantly this global context acknowledges what is at the heart of the Australian mining boom: despite the corporate hype, it is not an orchestrated economic achievement but simply a side-effect of globalisation and breakneck Chinese industrial growth. This wide-angle shot, so vital in explaining the caprice and randomness of the modern boom, is too big to be captured by a close-up profile. Kurmelovs should be commended for straying in this way. Perhaps for his next book could even travel outside of Australia to bring the economics and politics alive with foreign people and landscapes.
Regarding landscape – you feel Kurmelovs is far more at home in the red earth of the Pilbara than he was in the grey fluorescent-lit halls of Canberra in his previous book Rogue Nation, dealing with the rise of ‘outsider’ politics in Australia. In Boom and Bust I felt the heat, tasted the metallic dust and had to fight the urge to swat the flies away even as I lay on my couch in Melbourne. I also drank a lot of beer throughout the course of the 320 pages but that might be unrelated.
In all Boom and Bust is another of Kurmelovs’s works that is vital to the national discussion. More and more this discussion is becoming limited to a hollowed-out journalism sector. Thankfully Kurmelovs has again proven he is willing take up the slack and shine a light on a part of recent Australian history that is poorly understood, bring its actors to life and provide the context for it. Australians have never been great at understanding who we are in the world – perhaps with more works like Boom and Bust we might begin to find out.
Royce Kurmelovs Boom and Bust: The rise and fall of the mining industry, greed and the impact on everyday Australians Hachette 2018 PB 320pp $32.99
Kurt Johnson is a journalist and author of The Red Wake: A hybrid of travel, history and journalism, Random House, 2016.
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