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ARGYLE

ARGYLE

THE IMPOSSIBLE STORY OF AUSTRALIAN DIAMONDS

STUART KELLS

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

www.mup.com.au

First published 2021

Text Stuart Kells, 2021

Images individual contributors, various dates

Design and typography Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2021

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Cover design by Peter Long

Cover photograph by Paul Williams/Science Photo Library

Typeset in 12/15.5pt Adobe Garamond Pro by Cannon Typesetting

Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group

9780522877250 (paperback)

9780522877267 (ebook)

For Ewen Tyler, Bill Leslie and Alan Joneswithout whom the diamonds would not have been mined, and this book would not have been written

FOREWORD

GEOFFREY BLAINEY

T HIS IS THE history of Argyle, one of the most surprising mines in the world. In its heyday it produced a higher annual tally of diamonds than any African mine, and it is still famous as the treasure house of the rare pink diamond. And yet the first diamonds were discovered in an isolated corner of Australia that was renowned for its fierce summers and an annual monsoonal assault of high humidity and torrential rain.

As a historian I first visited this north-west corner of the nation in 1961. In that year no politicians or geologists would have predicted that it would become, in the next thirty years, one of the worlds richest and most diverse producers of minerals. I spent two days in sleepy Port Hedland. You could hardly call it a harbour, but it was to become one of the biggest cargo ports in the world and the hub of a huge iron ore province. Nearby was Marble Bar, a struggling gold town seemingly close to extinction, and yet 400 kilometres away was the Great Sandy Desert where eventually the Telfer mine became the nations second-largest gold producer.

Back in 1961, in an aircraft travelling further north, I sat next to a man who told me that he was about to be a lighthouse keeper at lonely Cape Leveque. There he would be in radio contact with only a few small ships each month; today two new ports nearby send away a procession of big ships carrying liquefied natural gas and iron ore to cities in East Asia. It was in this same dynamic region that Argyles diamonds were unexpectedly discovered in 1979, almost at the close of the remarkable burst of mineral discovery.

A hero of this fascinating and lucid history is Ewen Tyler. At the age of twelve he had chanced to see tiny diamonds in the jungle of Sarawak, but he became intrigued by the geology of diamonds when he was a university student in Perth where his lecturer, Rex Prider, possessed that rare gift: an original mind.

At first Tylers livelihood was in goldmines in Tanganyika (todays Tanzania), and it was not until 1968 that he and his wife, Aldyth, returned to Western Australia, which was then in the midst of an exploration boom. Before long he was in charge of the little Kalumburu syndicate and searching for diamonds in rocky terrain. It is a common myth that the quest for a buried mineral deposit is usually a simple short-term task, calling only for a four-wheel drive and a tough pair of boots. However, an intensive mineral search is now a branch of science, and high finance. A revolutionary geological theory had to be shaped, and accepted knowledge overthrown, before the first pipe of diamonds was discovered in a peculiar volcanic setting that had seemed worthless to scientists fresh from southern Africa, the traditional home of diamonds. And the buyers in Amsterdam and jewellers in Paris and Los Angeles had to be persuaded of the worth of these distinctive gems.

In this isolated region where the towns and big mines were far apart, and remoter from the nearest capital city, efficient transport was crucial and costly. Even the discovery team employed a helicopter in the daily collecting of rock samples that provided clues to the hidden presence of diamonds. A bold decision was made to abandon the idea of building a large township for the workforce, and to experiment instead with the novel fly-in and fly-out system. Soon the typical employees arrived by special planes, worked long hours for two or three weeks, and then flew perhaps half the length of the continent for a time of leisure at home.

By the time hydro-electricity arrived from the Ord River Dam, the open-cut mine was working on a large scale. We imagine a diamond mine will not be large, but a mountain of rock has to be mined in order to recover the scatter of diamonds. Today this gigantic quarry-hole, though mostly quiet, is an eye-opener. If it chanced to lie in the Blue Mountains instead of several thousand kilometres to the north-west, and if it could be easily reached by day-tourists from Sydney, the visitors would marvel at its size and symmetry, the steep terraces and the varied rock-colours. But back at Argyle, as this book explains, the Aboriginal people were not sure that they themselves were the gainers.

Stuart Kells, the author, has a background that aided him. Though young, he has been a senior official in government, a director at one of the Big Four accountants, a dealer in antiquarian books, an editor, and a participant in financial change: he once worked for the sharebroker and investment bank Potter Warburg. Originally a country boy, he does not have that unease towards mining that tends to characterise each big Australian city except Perth and now permeates even the primary schools and their teachers. This book is a valuable insight into an industry once widely praised but now undervalued by a nation that relies on it so strongly.

CONTENTS

ABBREVIATIONS

AAPA	Aboriginal Affairs Planning Authority
ADEX	Australian Diamond Exploration NL
AIDC	Australian Industry Development Corporation
AMPLA	Australian Mining Petroleum Law Association
AO	Anglo Oriental (Australia) Pty Ltd
APR	advance purchases reserve
ASX	Australian Stock Exchange
AWU	Australian Workers Union
BCG	Boston Consulting Group
cpht	carats per hundred tonnes
CRA	Conzinc Riotinto of Australia
CSIRO	Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
CSO	Central Selling Organization
CZC	ConZinc Corp

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