Australian urban paradox: building impossibly big cities that cling to the east coast, while running out of land and water and, at the same time, digging impossibly big holes in the west, which create organic urban forms that in themselves allude to future designs and possibilities for redemption. ‘ — John Gollings and Ivan Rijavec, Now+When Australian Urbanism 5 Kalgoorlie Boulder The town of Kalgoorlie - Boulder, population 30,000 is situated in the goldfields of central Western Australia along the Indian- Pacific railway line, 600km east of Perth – already one of the most geographically isolated cities in the world. The ‘Fimiston Open Pit’, more commonly referred to as the ‘Super Pit’ is Australia’s largest open pit gold mine and approximately 3.5 km long, 1.5km wide and more than 300 metres deep. Amazingly, some residential areas sit as close as 200 metres from its edge. The Super Pit wasn’t always so big and was initially comprised of a series of smaller underground mining operations located along a stretch of land known as the ‘Golden Mile’. Consequently, the Super Pit only came into being under consolidation by the infamous businessman, Alan Bond who managed to buy up many of the leases. The mine’s influence, imagined and real on Kalgoolie is near-unfathomable. It operates non-stop, twenty- four hours a day, every day of the year, employing more than a thousand people and producing up to 800,000 ounces of gold on an annual basis. Noise, blast vibration, blast overpressure, not to mention the tons of earth extracted in addition to the gold, all have a major impact on day-to-day life in the town. Daily blasting that quite literally shakes the town has in fact become a tourist attraction and draws visitors to mine look outs. Tourists can even call ahead to enquire about upcoming schedules. For now, the mine is expected to close in 2021 and although the mine’s life has been extended in the past, the Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mine is already welcoming suggestions from the public as to the future use of this industrial-scaled asset.
A recent report from the World Bank, ‘Turn Down the Heat’ expresses concern that any temperature increase of 4° will deliver more frequent extreme weather patterns, something that should concern all Australians after the Bureau of Meteorology added new colours to charts in order to accommodate higher readings during another summer of record temperatures and savage bush fires. 4 The exploding demand from Asia for Australia’s mineral resources is forcing a complete overhaul of political and economic thinking. It is relocating vast numbers of skilled and unskilled workers to once anonymous locations all over Australia from the cities in the east. The remote northern city of Darwin is now the nation’s thriving gateway to Asia, providing access to other South-East Asian cities in less than half the time it takes to fly from Sydney. It is precisely this proximity to Asia that is of interest to the US military, who recently began rotating thousands of American combat soldiers through Darwin each year, beginning an agreement that that will see up to 2,500 troops visiting the area by 2017. Significant military developments such as these do not pass unnoticed and the reaction from Asia has been mixed, particularly in China, Australia’s largest trading partner. In contrast to Australia’s large coastal cities are the small, remote mining towns in the country’s isolated interior where the impact of mining on communities is clearly registered by the proximity of urban residential areas to operating mines. With specific reference to the towns of Broken Hill, Kalgoorlie, Port Headland and Newman, one must ask how this country’s rich geology, far from the population centres of the eastern coast, is feeding the growth of cities across Asia while seeding a new form of Australian outback urbanism. And are government agencies meeting the basic needs of communities as populations bulge in what were once small rural towns? ‘This is a telling juxtaposition. For, as much as Australia is building up in the east, it is digging down in the west - actually digging city-sized holes and shipping the ore to the northern hemisphere to become other cities. Here is the
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