Book Review - The Rush that Never Ended by Geoffrey Blainey

 The Rush that Never Ended : a History of Australian Mining by Geoffrey Blainey

Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1978 (3rd edition)     ISBN 0522841457

When the first edition of this book was published in 1961, export of iron ore from Australia was only just beginning, after the lifting of a ban imposed in 1938. The Rush that Never Ended was the first comprehensive history of Australian mining, which, given the place mining held in the formation and development of colonial Australia, is actually quite astounding. Since this third edition was published in 1978 mining in this country has moved to another level, but Blainey's book is still a worthwhile read, full of interesting facts about the development of the industry.

Blainey explains quite simply the differing rushes for metals throughout our white history... he doesn't quite call it out as greed, but essentially greed is the reason behind all the different phases of our mining history. Gold was "discovered" once the Crown no longer automatically owned what a prospector found, and all the metals were discovered as and when they became valuable and payable commodities - famously Lang Hancock knew about the huge Hamersley iron deposit but kept it secret from 1952 until 1961 when export markets finally opened up for that commodity.

Blainey starts at the beginning with the first and most precious metal sought by prospectors, gold. He clearly maps the incredible effect the gold finds, first in New South Wales and then in Victoria, had on the young colony: the population exploded, and huge economic effort went in to developing the industry. The romantic image of a prospector making it rich by panning some creek or digging up some quartz with a shovel has stuck in our collective memory, but in the history of gold mining in Australia, that era was quickly over, to be replaced by capital and large workforces. 

This change was more painful than it had to be - mining law was skewed to support individual prospectors: mining leases were too small to be developed properly for deep mining. Once this was changed the drawback became the lack of experience of the miners in deep-lead mining. In fact a certain scorn for science and geology was the bugbear for Australian mining for a lot longer than it should have been.

After gold, the most-sought mineral was copper, which was being mined early on in South Australia. Blainey well describes the discovery and development of Broken Hill, with its massive lodes of silver and lead and the share frenzy that accompanied the discovery. To mine on such scale massive capital inflows are required - the various frenzies, scams and massive windfalls that washed over people who invested in mines are covered comprehensively by Blainey - money is just as important as metal in the ground for a successful mine.

As the gold-fields close to "civilization" were mined out, prospectors moved farther afield to try and make their fortune, Blainey describes the move north to the Queensland tropics, west to the bonanza of Kalgoorlie and surrounds, and all the trials and tribulations that went with prospecting in jungles and deserts. Again some people made a fortune, but most barely got by, and usually ended up working for a big company and hoping that they might make a bundle speculating in shares...most people didn't.

Let's not forget Tasmania - perhaps Australia's largest mine up until the 1970s, Mount Lyell and surrounds were a story of triumph over nature and finance to unleash a huge cache of wealth for savvy investors.

With a good bibliography and index, The Rush that Never Ended is a fine introduction to one of Australia's founding, and greatest industries.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Peeling the Onion by Gunter Grass

 Peeling the Onion by Gunter Grass, translated from the German by Michael Henry Heim

London: Harvill Secker, 2007 (first German edition 2006)      ISBN 9781846550621

I tend as a rule not to read biographies of authors, unless the life of the author is the mainspring of their work. Gunter Grass is an exemplar of that, mining his life to create amazing fiction over the years. I first encountered Grass in The Flounder rather than The Tin Drum, and I must say I found the latter not as powerful as the former, despite the fame it brought to the author. Be that as it may, I've been aware of this memoir since the controversy caused by it's publication, and thought it might give me some insight into Grass' works.

The controversy of course was the revelation that Grass - who famously has built his literary career on destroying the legacy of Nazi Germany - not only volunteered for the Wehrmacht, but was enlisted in the Waffen SS. Peeling the Onion deals with that and so much more as Grass reflects on his early life, up until his first marriage.

The book is a 400 page reflection on what Grass did do, what he didn't do, and how memory makes itself, sometimes out of nothing, sometimes with something small that gains a significance beyond it's worth, and sometimes eliding major events. The title of the book describes Grass' approach to writing his life: peeling the onion back layer by layer, investigating each skin to see what it can tell him about himself.

He spends much of the first half of the book investigating the question of what he actually did feel about the Nazis, and why in fact he volunteered for the army, much against his parent's wishes. He certainly never thought that the Nazi's were evil, he believed that Germany was fighting for it's existence, and in fact refused initially to believe the evidence of the Holocaust when a POW (as did most of his fellow prisoners).

His old self questions his young self about why he didn't  protest, why did he follow the progress of the German Army and Navy on maps, why did he acquiesce to it all, and why did he volunteer to fight? As with many things in life, the answers are complex - youth desires to be a hero, youth wants away from parents, youth wants away from the boredom of the Luftwaffe Flak unit he was dragooned into. Age describes the folly of his choice, and shows via others that acquiescence to evil is not obligatory. His description of a fellow recruit who refused to bear arms ("wedontdothat") is a picture of what he could have done if he had the wisdom of age when he was a youth.

By the time he joined his unit, an SS Panzer Division , the final collapse of Germany was underway, and he spent his time fleeing from Russians, until he was wounded by shell splinters and was sent to hospital in Marienbad, where he was at war's end, and from where he became a POW.

His descriptions of his time in the various POW camps describe the hunger, which gave his attendance at a cooking class given by another POW who was a chef an added glamour. This is one skin of the onion that Grass remembers distinctly - a room full of hungry men preparing imaginary dishes... dishes that he went on to cook himself once he was settled and had the means to purchase ingredients. He also writes about the time he spend in a camp sheltering in a foxhole with a very catholic young soldier named Joseph....who went on to become Pope Benedict XVI? Maybe... and that's one of the tropes of this book, can we trust what our memory tells us, and can we trust what Grass is telling us? He never resolves this point, which weaves it's way through this book as a ghostly echo of the life Grass may have led if he hadn't abandoned his faith.

After his release, and having located his parents and sister in Dusseldorf, he headed there to pick up the pieces of his life. He never questioned his family about the traumas they suffered as Danzig was overrun, but he knew that what happened there to them changed them for ever. Grass describes how he was determined to become a sculptor and began an apprenticeship as a stone mason, where he helped rebuild Dusseldorf. Eventually he was accepted into art school, and began his new life as an artist.

He goes on to describe how it was his poetry that first garnered attention, after having been taken up by Group 47. By this time he was married to his first wife, and he had attended a fateful dinner party where the son of the host marched around banging on a tin drum. This unleashed his mind to produce his most famous novel, and made him a writer of renown.

Peeling the Onion tells us a lot about Grass the person - selfish, observant, obsessed with art and history, and from a young age understanding where he wanted to go, if not how to get there. It's a great piece of writing, a wonderful meditation on what memory is and how it can flatter to deceive, and how hard it is to arrive at any sort of "truth" about a life lived, especially in the tumultuous European 20th century.

A great book.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell