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Graham's Photo Essays
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(To view an essay - click on its title)
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Recent photo essays:
Droving Woman
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The Riderless Horse
.
Put A Lasso On Hope
Earlier photo essays include:
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What the next essays have in common is they
depend more on sound than words or
pictures for their impact:
| For
bagpipe buffs For plane buffs For train buffs If you like steam engines this is what I would call a Poem to Dogged Persistence |
Leaving the mountains of Mongolia...
This is a picture I took in the early 1960s of the Quarana Plain in the
remote Pilbara region of Western Australia. It needs no words or
sounds to communicate how lonely the Pilbara was back then:
But the Pilbara is now Australia's richest mining area
with the rust-coloured mountains of Iron Ore in the
background being shipped to foreign lands who
ship billions of dollars back to Australia.
What happens to the torrents of cash
that comes from exporting millions
of tonnes of iron ore every year?
Some of it builds new office
blocks in Perth: |
Some of it builds new
mansions in
Perth: |
Some it it builds racing
yachts in Perth: |
Some of it builds Budget
Surpluses in Canberra: |
Are there any dangers in vast wealth?
Lang Hancock made his fortune from Pilbara iron ore and (late in life) he married his housekeeper
Rose - who soon developed very expensive tastes - like a new Perth mansion with plenty of light.
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Lang died a few years later and there was a big public brawl (via expensive lawyers)
between Rose and Lang's daughter (by a previous marriage) for custody of Lang's assets
including Prix D'Amour - the Gone With The Wind Perth mansion that Lang built for Rose.
Though it was only a few years old and in perfect condititon,
due to iron-ore and other mineral riches driving up the price
of prime riverside Perth land, Prix D'Amour (that took up
16 standard building blocks) was bulldosed and some
incredibly expensive new appartments now sit
where Prix D'Amour once did.
What happened to Gina Rinehart - Lang's daughter?
She became Australia's first female billionaire.
What happened to Lang Hancock?
He will be rememered as the first person to observe and realise that in fact Australia
could supply the total World consumption of iron ore probably for thousands of years.
A flight he took (over some odd rust-coloured Pilbara mountains) in 1952 directly led
to the early development of the giant Pilbara iron ore province in Western Australia.
That flight initiated a great wave of prosperity, which flowed to the State of Western Australia,
to the Federal Government, directly to companies and their employees involved
in the industry, and invisibly, to every person in Australia.
What happened to Rose?
Very rich in her own right, she married
a rich Perth land developer, divorced
him and settled in America.
Her departing words:
I am a broken woman. The
femme fatale in me has died.