After Gold: The long shadow of colonial mining in Australia
Susan Lawrence, Peter Davies and Lillian Pearce
La Trobe University / La Trobe University / RMIT
(Post)Colonial adventures in mining: The portrayal of mine exploration in North American reality television
Brian Leech
Augustana College
Art, extraction the ecoterritorial turn
Paula Serafini
University of Leicester
The legal combover of history: On abstraction, property, and race in the settler colony
Astrid Lorange and Andrew Brooks
University of New South Wales
Comments 15
Tēnā koutou – Hello everyone. In this global and digital event, I’d like to start by acknowledging the Indigenous people of the many lands on which we participate in this conference, and to honour Indigenous elders, past, present and emerging. I write this from the mana whenua of the Rangitāne o Manawatū – the indigenous lands of Rangitāne people of the Manawatū, in Aotearoa – New Zealand.
I am very pleased to introduce the ‘Pasts and futures stream: Colonialism, culture, post-extraction imaginaries’.
In our first session – ‘After Gold: The long shadow of colonial mining in Australia’ – Susan Lawrence, Peter Davis and Lillian Pearce position themselves as time travellers, who detail the ‘inescapable’ and ‘lingering legacies of mining’.
This is followed by Brian Leech’s discussion of ‘(Post)Colonial adventures in mining’, in which the cultural history of extraction is explored through ‘the portrayal of mine exploration in North American reality television’.
Paula Serafini then examines ‘Art, extraction the ecoterritorial turn’ by presenting the idea of territory as a mobilised and political space for art.
We finish this session with Astrid Lorange and Andrew Brooks, who engage with extraction through a discussion of the frontier ‘language of the colony’ in their presentation of ‘The legal combover of history: On abstraction, property, and race in the settler colony’
I hope that you’ll join me in warmly welcoming these presenters and that you’ll stay on to respond and pose questions by scrolling to the comments section at the bottom of the screen.
Thank you for these excellent presentations. This is an exploratory question for all of the panellists:
Extraction by its very definition indicates removal. Today, many of you have also explored what is left behind by colonising extractive industries. What has drawn you as researchers to examine the by-products of these legacies?
Hi Laura
Thanks for your question. For many years I’ve lived/worked/played in the beautiful goldfields regions of central and north-eastern Victoria. As a foreigner I was always struck by the distinctive history of the region and the clear evidence of former glory that remains in the architecture and public infrastructure of the region’s many towns. As an archaeologist I also wondered about all the damaged places that were the source of that mineral wealth, and how over 150 years later the scars are still so clear. Mining is not a short-term thing. It’s a boom-and-bust economy but the bust lasts a lot longer than the boom. What happens next to the people and places left behind continues to motivate my research.
Thanks for your great response on this, Susan. The idea that ‘the bust lasts a lot longer than the boom’ is something that we (people, governments, global citizens) could all spend more time considering, especially in terms of extraction. Where does your work take you next in this area?
Hi everyone! Thanks so much for the opening question, Laura.
My previous research has largely explored “real” mines and their history, but I began to encounter mining and its history in many movies and shows–everything from Disney’s original Snow White to blockbuster science fiction like Avatar. When I talk to non-academics about mining, though, they almost always point to television shows, not movies, so I started to watch the many American reality TV shows dedicated to mining. I was amazed at how similar their TV narratives seemed to the nineteenth century gold rush stories I was reading at the time. I began to think of these as legacy stories–ones that keep getting repeated for new generations. The mining industry sometimes brings about rather toxic legacies, but so do the many triumphalist stories told about mining. These shows often seem goofy, but they also sometimes use the guise of “authenticity” to hide troublesome lessons about gender, race, and the environment. I worry more about such lessons the more I watch TV with my kids (which, given the Covid-19 lockdown, has been rather a lot).
On a personal note, I was probably also drawn to this kind of legacy because it always looked like fun to be a television or film critic. Now I can pretend to be one.
Hello, thank you all for your wonderful presentations. Brian, I find your research very original and in particular in times of a global pandemic where fieldwork is difficult, it is so great to get inspiration what alternative methods can be used, Studying the portrayal of mining in pop culture seems extremely interesting. I was wondering if you could tell us a bit more about the local reaction of the mining show that was filmed in Ghana? Have you come across any local media articles or interviews/social media reactions from locals? You mentioned the government’s reaction, but I would also be interested to hear from the neighbors/ people living in the surrounding villages, etc. It must be a disturbing image to have a film crew from abroad come in and “pretend” to mine, especially given as it is illegal to do any small scale mining as a foreigner in Ghana. Thank you for your great presentation. Cindy
Thanks for the follow-up, Cindy.
Yes, indeed, I found a few local articles about– and a couple of in-depth investigations from the U.S.– of the Jungle Gold show. A few people thought that the Raw TV team was doing great work until they actually saw the show and soured on the portrayal. A popular Ghanaian news station, Joy FM, appears to have been a major force in convincing the government (and others) to look into the legality of the Jungle Gold enterprise. They sent one of their reporters to Kumasi, where it appears many locals were quite angry about the show’s portrayal and the reported actions of its stars. There was clearly a (false) rumor circulating by that point in time (May 2013) that the stars of the show had killed a man, too. The government minister for Lands and Natural Resources was contacted for comment by FM Joy reporters, which led to more concern and the eventual search for the Americans. (See https://www.myjoyonline.com/business/inusah-fuseini-fumes-over-jungle-ghana-documentary/ and https://www.myjoyonline.com/news/jungle-gold-documentary-govt-to-track-down-two-us-nationals/#!).
It does appear that, after the fact, a few locals remained happy about the money the team had pumped into the economy. They were actually annoyed because the Jungle Gold show had led to a crackdown on illegal mines in the area. Hence, many of the mining jobs locals had gained dried up. On the other hand, I’ve also found a number of articles from a few years after the fact where Ghanaians and other Africans express really strong anger about the show’s role in continuing negative impressions.
Thank you for your question, Laura. And thanks to the other panellist for their presentations, which I really enjoyed.
I guess something that underpins my research is the idea that extractivism is not only an economic model but also a logic that permeates different spheres of society, including our imaginaries and cultural manifestations. In my work I therefore look at how the extractive logic operates in different areas, and also how this can be countered through artistic and cultural practices. The long-term and recent legacies of extractivism are multiple, from the effects on urban dynamics to territorial conflicts in rural areas. Likewise, the kinds of interventions that artists and cultural practitioners carry out in order to fight that logic take different forms and aim at intervening or countering the extractive model in different ways, from denouncing invisibilized injustices, to deconstructing the ideology that sustains the extractive hegemony, to building other ways of being in the world that refuse this logic.
Hi Laura! First, sorry for the late reply. Last week in unexpected circumstances we ended up in a place with very patchy phone/internet reception. We’ve caught up now.
We take seriously the idea of colonisation as a structure, rather than event (per Wolfe) which we take to mean two related things: first, that it is a set of practices, infrastructures, and systems, and not merely an historical event; second that it is ongoing and continuous, albeit ever-changing, and therefore that which we live within, inherit, and ultimately what we oppose and seek to dismantle.
The project of colonisation in and of itself is extractive, but also productive – as is the case of all extractive industries and processes. The things that are considered to be by-products of extraction, ie waste, toxicity, are foundational to the logic of extraction itself: ie there has to be a sense of that which is waste (country, toxic run-off, but also surplus populations, Indigenous sovereignty) in order to value that which is extracted. So we gently push back against the idea of the product and the by-product in order to say that the two are more complicated in their relation than they may first appear.
Part of what we are trying to do is to think of the logic of extraction as that which underpins not only extractive industries but also the logics of governance that underpin colonialism.
Thanks, I really enjoyed the talks in this session I watched, and as an artist who works with mining slag, found especial resonance in the talk of Susan Lawrence, Peter Davies and Lillian Pearce. I find this issue of legacies of mining very complex – this heady mix of evident toxicity and environmental degradation, social nostalgia, romantic ruin, and simple disappearance from view. I’ve been documenting this range of legacies in the Flinders Ranges, as the mining sites there encompass all these positions.
Dear all,
I am Roy Cobby, PhD candidate at King’s College London, taking part in Knowledge production and data extraction stream Panel 2: Technology and infrastructure. Your presentations were very insightful!
Susan, Peter and Lillian, thanks for explaining the path-dependent legacy of extractivism, and the present alarming lack of precautionary principles when establishing new activities.
Brian, that was a fascinating overview of a very important medium. I wonder if these “reality TV” portrayals are even more effective than old Hollywood films in building extractivist imaginations, since they simulate reality…
Paula, that was a very good illustration of the importance of expanding the notion of territory beyond narrow Western conceptions, which is important as extractivism is often very aseptically focused on political economy.
Finally, Astrid and Andrew, that was a great overview and really helpful in understanding those spatial and racialised inequalities operating through abstract market forces.
Thanks, Roy.
I thought I’d quickly reply to your comment about my presentation. Yes, I’m increasingly convinced that these kinds of reality TV shows have more–or at least as much–power in shaping people’s ideas about extraction as many movies. No matter how much we’re told that reality TV isn’t actually reality, their supposed authenticity seems to convince people that they’re seeing “real” mining. I’m often surprised at how many Americans I meet who have seen the most popular of these shows, Gold Rush, and who are therefore convinced that they too could mine if they just had an excavator and a bit more gumption. The other place I see mining show up all the time is in online video games, like Minecraft, which I’m currently researching too. Video games, like reality TV, are more ubiquitous than movies and hence probably more likely to affect people’s opinions about the industry.
Thanks so much for the kind words, Roy! Looking forward to catching up on your presentation!
Hi
I’m linking in from Ireland (NI) where we’re campaigning against a major planning application for a gold mine and processing plant by a Canadian gold exploration company, Dalradian Resources. As goldmining is new people including the statutory environmental and regulation bodies are accepting the information presented by the company’s ‘experts’ as fact. While the campaign has raised 36,000+ submissions of objection to the proposed mining operation, the greatly inflated promises of job creation and ‘inward investment’ gains the support of politicians and the company’s big PR campaign coupled with financial gifts to community and charitable organisations (using the Covid 19 crisis to their advantage they gave £50,000 to Marie Curie a support organisation for the terminally ill – ironic!). For people whose families have lived in these upland hill of the Sperrin Mountains AONB it fits within the definition of a new colonisation.
We are interested in learning from the experience of communities who have suffered from goldmining elsewhere.
Our group is on Facebook: Save Our Sperrins (SOS) (See also FB DontMineUs and also Greencastle People’s Office)
Wonderful presentation and project, Susan and colleagues. I’m constantly struck by the deep similarities on all these questions of the history and contemporary/future legacies of mining between Australia and Canada. We’ve mobilized a number of similar concepts (slow violence, sacrifice zones, toxic legacies) in our Abandoned Mines and Toxic Legacies projects (www.toxiclegacies.com). Now, with new work on closure and remediation, we’re trying to trace these relations into the long future as well, particularly at acutely toxic sites.
Which bring me to my question, well suited for archaeologists I think: is there any consideration given to the problem of long-term management, perpetual care, and communicating with future generations at closed/former mining sites in Australia. It’s a topic we’ve taken up a bit recently (https://niche-canada.org/2019/10/16/there-is-a-monster-under-the-ground/) but wondered if there are Australian examples or discussions.
Super stuff! Would love to connect more with your team sometime.