Green, powerless and defenceless

Australian school kids got cards to be used to identify enemy planes overhead and fathers with picks and shovels were told to dig air raid pits in school grounds (even then I thought that our one-room Wheatvale school with 13 pupils was probably not a top priority target for Japanese bombers.)

We saw no enemy planes at Wheatvale but a bomber from our side was forced to land in our neighbour's wheat paddock and a big convoy of American Jeeps and trucks stopped at our farm to make their morning coffee (it was the first time we ever tasted coffee).

A critical war time shortage was copper for cartridge cases and communications - Australia had mines producing lead, zinc, silver, gold and iron, but there was a critical shortage of copper.

Fortuitously, just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, an exploration drill hole at Mount Isa had struck rich copper ore.

Mount Isa was then called on to avert a calamitous shortage of copper in Australia. With government encouragement, Mount Isa Mines made the brave decision to suspend their profitable silver/lead/zinc operations and convert all mining and treatment facilities to extracting copper.

The lead concentrator could be converted to treat copper ore, but the biggest problem was how to smelt the copper concentrates. Luckily the company had skilled engineers and metallurgists in the lead smelter. In a miracle of improvisation, scrap steel and spare parts were purchased and scavenged from old mines and smelters from Cloncurry, Mt Elliott, Mt Cuthbert and Kuridala and cobbled into a workable copper smelter. In 1943 the first Mount Isa blister copper was produced. Production continued after the war when Mount Isa returned to extracting the then more profitable silver/lead/zinc. Later, new plant was built enabling both lead and copper to be produced from this fabulous mine.

This story of the importance of self-reliance has lessons for today especially at a time when the final closure of the great Mt Isa copper mines has just been announced.

The war on carbon energy, net zero propaganda, the renewable energy targets, escalating electricity costs and the voices in Parliament calling for Emissions Trading Schemes have all unnerved our big users of carbon fuels and electricity.

Smelting and refining have become threatened industries in Australia. Already six major metal smelting/refining operations have closed in Australia this century and more are likely. The closures have affected copper, lead, zinc, steel and aluminium – the sinews of modern industry. And car manufacturing, with all its skills and tools, has gone.

Local production and refining of oil is also declining, while "lock-the-gate" picketers are trying to prevent domestic exploration and production of gas. More and more land and offshore waters are closed to exploration and mining, and heavy industry is scorned.

Australia has lost over half of its oil refining capacity and most of our liquid fuel comes from foreign refineries. At normal rates of usage, national reserves of diesel would last about three weeks and ULP about four weeks. But in the event of a panic for fuel, city food shelves and fuel supplies would be cleaned out in days, maybe hours. Commercial aircraft would be grounded in a fortnight and our Air Force soon after.

We are losing the resources, skills and machinery needed for our own security. And we fritter our declining resources on green energy white elephants like Snowy 2, green hydrogen, dream-time extension cables to transmit "green" electricity from Darwin to Singapore, hydrogen electrolyser magic in Gladstone, a Pioneer Valley pumped hydro scheme (Snowy 3?), massive new power lines to collect piddling energy everywhere and many other green dreams with net consumption of energy and metals.