£62,000 for five months’ work: life on an Australian gold mine

Like his ancestors, Cook has been scouring the famous Kalgoorlie Goldfields, about 370 miles (590 km) inland from Perth, for more than 30 years. The original gold rush began at the end of the 19th century, after three Irishmen found nearly 100 ounces of precious metal in the dry red soil in 1893.

Today he is at the vanguard of a new wave of gold rush prospectors, benefiting from the boom in gold prices led by global instability, including the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East and President Trump’s unpredictable foreign policy. An ounce of gold is worth about A$7,000, having risen by more than 70 per cent over the past year. It is traditionally viewed as a safe haven for investors in troubling times.

More than 70 per cent of the nation’s gold is produced in Western Australia. Some 210 tonnes are unearthed per year, or roughly 6.8 million ounces, worth almost A$50 billion. Most of it comes from the Kalgoorlie Goldfields, particularly the Super Pit, a colossal man-made crater visible from space where trucks the size of a two-storey house transport mineral-rich soil.

Northern Star, Kalgoorlie’s biggest employer and the owner of the Super Pit, is raking in huge profits and expanding its operations. On Thursday, the company revealed its half year profits had jumped by 34 per cent to A$1.88 billion.

There is plenty of money to be made, even for unskilled workers willing to be trained up to drive a truck or operate a digger. Iron ore mines in the Pilbara, in the northern part of Western Australia, are a magnet for foreign backpackers, including young English and Irish workers, who can find well-paid jobs cleaning and cooking in the huge worker camps, as well as other jobs in the mines themselves.

“If you walk in off the street, pass a drug test and turn up with a good attitude then we’ll pay you $120,000 a year for the privilege [£62,000] and you work five months a year,” Northern Star’s head of growth pledged back in November. In underground mines, drivers of huge mechanical rigs, called drilling jumbos, can earn up to five times this amount, although this requires years of training on the job.

But the meteoric rise in gold’s value has also triggered a new gold rush among small, family run operators and amateur prospectors, and the practice has even become more popular among families who come out to the region on caravan holidays. One of Cook’s bestselling items in his two prospecting shops, in Kalgoorlie and Perth, is a pink pickaxe.

Tyler Mahoney, a fourth-generation gold prospector from Kalgoorlie, does not own a pink axe but is passionate about promoting gold prospecting to millennials. The 30-year-old has spent much of the last decade travelling around the world for reality TV shows, including Aussie Gold Hunters, Gold Rush and Parker’s Trail and documenting her adventures on social media.

Her parents, Lecky and Ted, continue to prospect and run the family gold mine full-time while she focuses on her gold nugget and jewellery business, The Prospectors Club. “There’s been a lot of big nuggets found a long time ago that people are wanting to sell now because the price has been so good,” she said.

But there is a darker side to the scramble for gold, with record prices making crooks more desperate to get their hands on it than ever. Detective Sergeant Graham Baylor cut his teeth patrolling the council estates of Cork, Ireland, before emigrating to Australia more than a decade ago.

The 39-year-old now spends much of his time chasing “dirt pirates” across the outback as head of Australia’s Gold Stealing Detection Unit, better known as the Gold Squad. Funded by the mining companies, it is the oldest specialist police unit in Western Australia and the only police department in the world still dedicated to tackling gold crime, after being established in 1907 to combat rampant theft in Kalgoorlie. Between themselves, Baylor and his small team cover a state the size of western Europe.

Although professional gold theft has fallen in recent months, probably because the mines beef up their security when prices are high, Baylor’s team is still kept busy. The detective said there had been a surge in backyard processing where thieves sneak into gold mine sites to steal huge mounds of ore before the precious metal is extracted and locked in a vault under armed guard.

“The crooks want to get that gold before it gets into a vault and process it themselves. Once it gets into the gold room, you’re talking about serious armed robbery, a Ronnie Biggs type job, to get at it,” said Baylor. Once they have stolen the dirt, the criminals — often members of outlaw motorcycle gangs, known as “bikies” — typically use a cement mixer and chemicals, such as mercury, to extract the gold.

Backyard processing and drugs also go hand in hand, with bikies also controlling the drugs trade. Meth use among those involved in backyard processing, in which it can be necessary to stay up through the night, is also common.

Baylor said his team frequently joined drug squad officers on their raids if they suspected an illegal gold smelting operation was taking place. “You can actually buy methamphetamine for a pot of gold bearing dirt,” said Baylor, who recalled running through a cloud of meth when a suspect who fled during a raid tore up a bag of the drug.

While Kalgoorlie’s miners, prospectors and dirt pirates are cashing in, the town itself has fallen on hard times. Its heritage as a frontier mining town is clear to see, from the Federation-style facades and balconies of the pubs and hotels, to the preposterously wide streets originally designed to accommodate camel trains and horse drawn wagons.

Crime, antisocial behaviour and inflated property prices have fuelled an exodus from Kalgoorlie over the last decade, with the population falling from a peak of almost 34,000 in 2013 to about 30,000 today.

Many of the shops on the high street are boarded up. The bars, propped up by heavyset men in high-vis overalls and served by scantily clad waitresses, known as “skimpies”, are not nearly as busy as they once were. Alcohol and drug abuse is still widespread, particularly among indigenous locals who come into Kalgoorlie from “dry” communities around the town, where alcohol is banned.

“People drink so much here because there’s not much else to do,” said one resident, whose partner works in the gold mines. To minimise the drink and drug culture in the town, mining companies have begun imposing random drug tests and a four-drink limit at their camps.

Many residents blame the town’s decline on the rise of Fifo (fly-in fly-out) workers, who stay in hotels or dedicated mining camps during their long shifts in the mines before returning home to spend their hard-earned cash. Northern Star has come under fire for plans to build an 800-bed mining camp on the outskirts of town.

The plans, in addition to a 300-bed camp due to be completed this year, were approved by the state government last year despite strong opposition from local residents. Northern Star, the biggest employer in the region, said 80 per cent of its 2,700 workers lived in or around Kalgoorlie, but there was simply not enough accommodation to cater for its expanding workforce.

One of the most vocal critics of the use of Fifo workers is Ashok Parekh, a businessman known as the King of Kalgoorlie. The charismatic Dublin-born chartered accountant, who had an Irish mother and Indian father, chairs two small mining companies but is better known for his hospitality empire. He owns the town’s only nightclub, an Irish pub and a restaurant, all housed in the historic Palace Hotel — famously Herbert Hoover’s favourite drinking hole when he worked in the goldfields as a young mining engineer, long before he became the 31st US president.

“These workers go to the airport, get taken in a bus to site, work for a week or two, and go back home. They don’t even come into Kalgoorlie. So that then affects the retailers. It affects the schools, the sports clubs, and the hospitality industry,” said Parekh, 69, from his “man cave” accountancy office, crammed with sporting memorabilia including a football shirt owned by Pele, Don Bradman’s cricket bat and Joe DiMaggio’s baseball.

Naturally, Glenn Wilson, Kalgoorlie’s mayor and a former local radio DJ, is fiercely loyal to the place he was born and raised. “As a city we want people to live here and work here,” he said, before adding with a hint of irony: “It’s like New York, if you can’t make it in Kalgoorlie Boulder, you can’t make it anywhere.”

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