Mine All Mine

As we’ve progressed southwards, we’ve noticed that the temperature at night has been dropping noticeably, with a special little dip just before dawn around 6am.  That’s when the alarm woke us and we packed up the tent in the semi-light to ensure that we’d be ready for the 8 o’clock Rio Tinto mine tour starting from the town of Tom Price.  The town exists only because of the iron ore mine which is named after the American geologist who carried out some of the first trials in the area to determine whether mining was commercially feasible.  Apparently he reported that the area could supply about 80 per cent of the world’s needs.  That was back in the early 1960’s.  Mount Tom Price was also named after the man and ever since Rio Tinto has been removing it. 

The whole operation is mind boggling enormous.  Some 360 million tonnes of iron ore is removed each year, crushed into small pieces and exported, mainly to China, Taiwan and Korea.  What was once a mountain is now an enormous hole in the ground.  Look carefully and you’ll see a ‘Tonka toy’ truck down there.

Now that ‘Tonka toy’ is not a toy at all.  It can carry 240 tonnes of ore and has tyres almost two metres in diameter.

The digger that loads it takes just eight scoops to fill a truck and 36 of these trucks works 24 hours a day.  We’d already seen the 2.4 kilometre long trains that transport the ore to Dampier for loading onto ships.  Even the rail system with 1,600 kilometres of track is Australia’s largest privately owned network servicing 15 mines.  Here we saw the trains being loaded by a giant scoop and conveyor system.  It takes just one and a half hours to fully load a train, by which time the next one is waiting.  As I said, the whole operation is enormous.

Tom Price and the nearby mining town of Paraburdoo are our last places of call in the Pilbara.  I should have mentioned this name earlier.  The Pilbara is the large, sparsely populated region in the north of Western Australia known for its ancient landscapes, red earth and vast mineral deposits.  We’ve seen quite a bit of it, brought a lot of red dust with us and are now at last heading for the coast.

The road from Tom Price to Exmouth is over 600 kilometres of unchanging scenery.  The most exciting part was when we stopped for a cuppa and watched a couple of budgerigars.

Otherwise it looked like this.

What with leaving late, we didn’t complete the journey in a single day so free camped overnight in a rest area (toilets but no showers) arriving Exmouth about noon.  Instead of all that red dust we can see the blue Indian Ocean.