Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Susan Lawrence & Peter Davies, La Trobe University Press, $34.99.
The story of mining, water and the environment in Victoria is remarkable, sobering and noteworthy.
It was a fascinating quest. For a long time, industrial archaeologists had been studying abandoned sites and ruins where people once mined for gold. A few years ago, they began wondering about the enormous eroded pits left behind on some of the goldfields, about how they were made and who created them. Clearly, the miners removed all the soil to get the gold, but where had they put the dirt?
According to the authors, “thus began our remarkable journey into the wet, muddy, sludgy world of gold-run Victoria.” It’s an interesting, disconcerting legacy of the gold rush. Everyone knows gold made Victoria rich, but did you know gold mining was disastrous for the land or that this conservation devastation still affects the rivers and floodplains?
Victorians had a name for this mining waste: ‘sludge’. Sludge submerged Victoria’s best grapevines near Bendigo, filled Laanecoorie Reservoir on the Loddon River and flowed down from Beechworth over thousands of hectares of rich agricultural land. Children and animals drowned in sludge lakes. Mining effluent contaminated three-quarters of Victoria’s creeks and rivers.
Sludge was a chronic environmental disaster that became the normal situation for several generations. Neither was it a little, local problem. Mining and mining waste affected three-quarters of Victoria’s rivers.
“The story we recount here is not just a historical curiosity. It remains important for Victorians now because mining waste reshaped the rivers and floodplains that we continue to live on, farm and manage. The story of sludge is significant well beyond Victoria. This is a forgotten chapter in the long history of our modern attitudes to water, and in the modern identification of water itself as a commodity that could be bought and sold”.
As Lawrence and Davies point out: in the stories of Victoria’s golden past perhaps we can see hints of how we can learn to live sustainably, now and in the future, with both the water and the mining that we need so much.
