The Deal Is Simple. Australia Gets Money, China Gets Australia
How's that supposed to make a country feel?
Christian Sprogoe
Every third Wednesday, Michael Box gets up at 3:30 in the morning to catch a flight out of Perth. Isolated in the south-west of Australia, Perth (pop. 1.6 million) is 1,700 miles from the next large city, Adelaide, which isn't even that big. Box and about a dozen co-workers fly two hours north to a yet more remote section of Australia, the Pilbara, a 193,000-square-mile hump of territory arcing into the Indian Ocean. They will land on this patch of iron-rich red earth and spend the next two weeks sending as much of it as they can, about a million tons a day, to China.
The Pilbara—the word is Aboriginal for mullet, a type of fish running in the mountain creeks—is both the end of the earth and the wellspring of Australia's future. The desolate region was home to indigenous people for millennia, then to the stockmen and adventurers who populate fantasies of the outback. It is the last place you would expect to find a businessman from China, let alone several thousand native Chinese.
Here, representatives of Chinese companies Chinalco, CITIC, Sinosteel, Ansteel, and China Metallurgical Group work alongside employees of BHP Billiton (BHP) and other mining companies, like Box's employer, Rio Tinto (RTP), in which China has an interest. Among their jobs—which include building power stations, desalination plants, and other infrastructure around the mines—is overseeing the removal of the iron ore, which is loaded onto 325-yard-long bulk carriers waiting by purpose-built wharves 500 yards long. (Construction has begun on a still larger installation, including a 1.1 mile long jetty.) About eight of these massive ships leave every day.
The red earth here contains an estimated 24 billion tons of iron ore. In the 1970s it left in smaller quantities and returned to Australia in Toyotas and Mazdas; now the dirt is going offshore forever, to house and transport workers in the cities of China. In this earth lies Australia's miracle economy, which has seen its gross domestic product grow 3.2 percent in the last year.
If you were searching for someone who has handled as much of this dirt as anyone in the past 40 years, you would find Box, 53, one of the 45,000 Australians who live and work in the Pilbara region. Everyone calls him "Boxy," as he is named on his navy-blue overalls and dayglo vest. "Call me any other name, I won't know who you're talking to," he says.
As a teenager in the 1970s, Boxy came up here to work for Hamersley Iron, building the town of Paraburdoo to support workers in the Pilbara mines. For 92 cents an hour he was one of "a tribe of dogsbodies," as he calls manual laborers, "carting sand and rocks, planting lawns, building retaining walls, then moving into the mine, crushing and screening iron ore, then loading it onto the trains."
Thirty-five years later Boxy is still here, now earning A$145,000 ($129,000) a year as a truck operator for Rio Tinto, his waist thickened by his love of beer, his eyesight aided by thick-rimmed glasses, and with a "hole in my hair that grew as big as my head."
By 7:30 a.m. he is in his room in a three-bedroom prefab donga in the miners' camp. A donga is a rudimentary shack, dusted with red dirt but fitted out with flat-screen TVs, sophisticated communications, and creature comforts. After breakfast and a change, he arrives at the West Angeles mine, one of a cluster of mega-mine sites in the Hamersley Ranges. By 8:30 he's at work.
In his time, Boxy has done "just about every job in mining," but his great love is driving big trucks. "After 11 years, I got to drive a 100-ton Wabco truck, working with loaders and bulldozers," he remembers. "We were just like boys in a sandpit." He now oversees a test project of driverless Komatsu trucks that cart out 300 tons at a time, moving 80,000 tons over two 12-hour shifts. When the drilling is good, he says, they can shift 120,000 tons in 24 hours. Without drivers, the trucks are more reliable, with radar sensors stopping them from crashing. They roll 24 hours a day.
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