While 1997 was the bicentenary of mining in
Australia by people of European descent, the
history of mining in this country stretches back
much further.
For more than 40 000 years before the arrival of
the First Fleet in Sydney Harbour, Australian
Aborigines had been mining the land for ochre and
stone.
Aborigines depended on their stone implements to
gather and process their food; ochre was a vital
ingredient in art and religious practices; quarries
and ‘processing’ sites were developed to cater for
the demand for these products; and transport
routes were established to allow for their trade.
While ochre and stone of one sort or another can
be found almost anywhere in Australia, the ochre
and stone deposits that were exploited by
Aborigines were of particularly high quality.
The higher the quality, the larger the mining
operation and the greater the distance over which
the product was traded. Ochre from north western
South Australia and from eastern Western Australia
and stone axes from Mount Isa-Cloncurry were
traded far outside these districts. At times many
different clans would gather near a quarry site to
trade for the stone or ochre and to hold
ceremonies, initiations and other important cultural
events.
Ownership of mines rested with the clan on whose
land they occurred and access to them was
allowed only with the permission of these
custodians. Within a clan, the actual mining was
often undertaken by a smaller group who had
special knowledge of how to correctly extract the
resource.
Mines were gen