Barbara Pini writes on major themes from two projects; the first focuses on the closure of the Ravensthorpe nickel mine in the south-west of Western Australia while the second examines community activism and regional development in the New South Wales Liverpool Plains in the context of the granting of exploration licences to mining corporations.Gendering sociological studies of resource affected rural communities: Case studies of Ravensthorpe and the Liverpool Plains
Barbara Pini
Introduction
The ‘resource boom’ that occurred in Australia over the past decade and the more recent detrimental impact of the global financial crisis on the resource sector nationally have elicited significant media attention, but far more limited scholarly commentary. At the same time this literature has been somewhat partial as scholarship has primarily focused on the workplace as the key (or only) site of analysis and thus left the connections between mining work and families, relationships and communities under theorized.
In 2009 I began two projects with colleagues aimed at addressing these significant gaps in the literature. The first focuses on the closure of the Ravensthorpe nickel mine in the south-west of Western Australia while the second examines community activism and regional development in the New South Wales Liverpool Plains in the context of the granting of exploration licences to mining corporations. In the following brief reports I highlight some of the key themes arising from the interviews we have conducted for these case studies which demonstrate that a gendered reading of the narratives brings to the fore the importance of family, relationships and community in studies of mining.
The closure of the Ravensthorpe nickel mine
(Robyn Mayes, Curtin University of Technology; Paula McDonald, QUT; Barbara Pini, Curtin University of Technology)
Ravensthorpe Shire in the south-west of Western Australia has undergone rapid and profound social upheaval resulting from the arrival of a BHP Billiton nickel mine which commenced construction in 2004, was officially opened in June 2008 and subsequently closed unexpectedly in January 2009. Though the Shire has a long history of mining this project was the first modern, large-scale mine in the area. In May 2008, upwards of 300 employees and their families were residing in the region Consisting of an open-cut mine and hydrometallurgical process plant and requiring an operational work force of 650 staff the venture had an expected ore reserve lifespan of twenty-five years.
Communities are central to the concept of a ‘social license to operate’ which describes an approach widely adopted in the minerals industry whereby the broad approval of communities is sought in order to facilitate the mine establishment and operation. ‘Community’ is conventionally positioned in this framework as an unproblematic entity separate from the sphere of work, a position which fails to take into account the ways in which industries also construct and (re)shape communities, sometimes in unexpected ways. This was evident in the Ravensthorpe Shire where the arrival of the mine involved substantial and uneven changes to both the local culture and physical environment. Many of these changes were unwelcome for large sections of the existing community. Hopetoun, the main site of residence for mine employees and families was described by local residents as being transformed from a ‘sleepy,’ ‘peaceful’ ‘retirement’ town to a ‘small mining town’. Concurrently, Jerdacuttup was reshaped around the mine site. Interviews revealed that narrow constructions of community embedded in the ‘social licence to operate’ fail to acknowledge community as both an emotional intersubjective ‘space’ or experience, and a physical site in which community is made possible. The day to day working of the mining operation influenced the experience of community through, for example, the ubiquity of mining uniforms in public spaces, the presence of mining vehicles with flags in the local streets, and the development of a substantial housing estate for mine workers.
Importantly, the emotions triggered by the closure of the mine extended beyond the families of sacked workers; they appear as public expressions of overwhelming shock, grief and anxiety as the reality of not only economic insecurity but also of the loss of friends, community, and a sense of a ‘bright’ future sets in. These complex feelings were publicly displayed in a range of ways from a series of impromptu street parties on the night of the closure to an emotional Australia Day celebration at the local oval. These displays forge a connection between work, family and the broader community in ways which directly involve members of the community not connected to mining.
The emotional dimensions of the mine closure were gendered in that women experienced loss of home and community in different ways from men. Women recounted the extra emotional and domestic labour required of them by the long work hours culture of the mine highlighting the familial dimensions of the well-recorded move in mining to continuous production, extended working hours and compressed and extended shifts One Ravensthorpe mother explains:
Our eldest boy, he’s got some learning difficulties…With F IFO (fly-in fly-out)there’s a lot of sacrifices. We just thought if we were together, and my husband would be home every night and then we could discuss issues that arise in the day. Whereas it’s very hard over the phone. When you’ve got boys that are teenagers – or 13 and 11.
While the shift to FIFO has been noted in the literature and some of its work-related impacts studied the dramatic separation of home/work it requires and the impact of this on families and communities has not been explored. Women also revealed the significant investments they had made in their ‘home’ as it existed in its present material form and in terms of future imaginings of family life. The limited available public space in the town which was not highly masculinised meant that homes were key sites for building and sustaining new friendships and relationships amongst the women. Further, women had undertaken an array of gendered work as part of their home-making practices and the intense feelings of belonging, stability and connection which such practices produce and reproduce was emphasised in many of their narratives.
I mean I look at my passionfruit vine, which is all irrelevant in the scheme of things, it’s not much, but you know, you plant a garden, you want to watch it grow and you think, ‘Oh my fruit trees, oh we’ve got fruit.’ It’s really silly. I know that, but you look at your trees and you go, ‘Oh I like this plant and that plant and when I leave they can’t go.’
Clearly, gender is a significant social cleavage marking the landscape of work, family and community in resource affected communities as work in mining remains highly masculinised. Women’s participation in the Ravensthorpe workforce was impeded, interviewees argued, by the long working hours (10-12 hours), the lack of flexible work-practices such as availability of part-time work and limited ready access to child-care. While the highly masculinised nature of the mining industry is not new what was being suggested, and what requires further analysis, is the extent to which changing industrial norms in the sector have further solidified mining as a masculine occupation.
Community activism and regional development in the Liverpool Plains
(Lou Conway, UNE; Alison Sheridan, UNE; Ruth Panelli, University College, London; Barbara Pini, Curtin University of Technology).
In 2006 the NSW Government granted BHP Billiton a $99 million coal exploration licence over the rich agricultural land of the Liverpool Plains and in August 2008 allocated a second licence to a Chinese coal company, Shenhua, for $300 million. While the NSW Government and the mining corporations insist that co-existence between mining and agriculture is possible this is not the view of a group of local people who are at the centre of a second collaborative study I have commenced on resource affected communities. Again, as in Ravensthorpe, issues of family, relationships and gender have come to the fore in the interviews we have undertaken with rural men and women involved in the dispute.
To date, our interviews have centred on members of the Caroona Coal Action Group (CCAG) which seeks to represent the interests of those concerned with longwall mining and its potential damage to underground aquifers. CCAG is pressing for an immediate moratorium of any kind of resource exploration on the Liverpool Plains and arguing for an independent catchment-wide water study to be performed so that the interconnections of the aquifers beneath the soil. Members of the group stress that they are not anti-mining per se, but against mining in what they describe as ‘prime agricultural land’.
Since July 2008 the CCAG has maintained a continuous blockage on the “Rossmar Park” property to stop access by the mining corporations. In explaining the rationale for the blockade, and the broader rationale for the establishment of CCAG, members focused on issues of democracy, transparency, environmental matters and land and property rights. However, also infusing narratives are more personal arguments relating to family and relationships. Important to participants are connections and interconnections to people and place produced over generations and embedded in shared histories and sustained socio-cultural practices. They recounted stories of grandparents, parents and other members of extended family as well as neighbours who had been involved in farming in the district. According to CCAG members the wealth of local and lived knowledge about the land has been obscured and/or marginalised in the granting of exploration licences and in corporate claims about the limited risks to the district of mining. This raises questions surrounding the values of, and relations with, land and the degree to which local or distant interests will claim or speak for the land (its qualities and future).’
The nexus between mining and farming on the Liverpool Plains provides a particularly rich case study of gender relations in rural Australia in that a specific women’s group, SOS Liverpool Plains, has been established to provide support to CCAG. The group is a recent illustration of rural women’s activism, which reaches back to the Country Women’s Association (which was first formed in Queensland and New South Wales in 1992) as well as to more recent second wave rural women’s groups such as Australian Women in Agriculture (which was established in 1993).
Asked about the existence of a women’s group one interviewee explained:
It’s because the women just take a different approach to the problem. I think that’s certainly a part of it. I think we have a different attitude in that we, sometimes at CCAG meetings there’s a lot of skirting around things…whereas, the women just get out there and do stuff. They’re not too worried about who they’re going to offend.
In elaborating on this the participant pointed to the success the SOS Liverpool Plains has had in generating interest in the issue through an active letter writing campaign stating
I think the women put a really human face to it all. It’s not about lawyers and it’s not about politics. It’s about the people and their livelihoods, and the land and their attachment to it and what it means to them, and their families.
At the same time another female participant explained the difficulty of mounting an argument against mining in rural areas when it was positioned by so many in government and industry as ‘the best thing that will ever happen to the area. Jobs. Jobs. Jobs. Money. Money. Money.’
Conclusion
Over the past decades feminist rural studies scholars have produced a significant boy of literature arguing that the employment relationship in rural spaces needs to be understood in the context of families and communities. However, the majority of this gender based research, has, like the broader discipline of rural sociology, focused largely on agriculture and on farming families and farming communities. In response we have undertaken these exploratory studies of Ravensthorpe nickel mine and the Liverpool Plains to begin a conversation about the complex, gendered interconnections of work, family and community in rural areas affected by mining.
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