Ancient quarrel

Mining, Metallurgy and the Meaning of Life
by Roger Sworder
Quaker Hill Press, 1995 (Tel: (02) 625 6112)

The author of this colourful account subtitles his work:  "A Book of Stories showing the hidden roots of the great debate over mining and the environment".  This is just as well because the work shows the triumph of content over structure, the former quite admirable, the latter rather shaky.  Sworder is Head of Humanities at the Bendigo Campus of La Trobe University and by all reports is a provocative and inspiring lecturer.  His book has some of the arbitrary character of lectures woven together, with an epilogue on mining in the nuclear age added almost as an afterthought.

Still, the author offers us a penetrating view of two schools of thought about mining operations since ancient times.  On the one hand mining was viewed by Ovid and Pliny, by medieval controversialists, by Wordsworth and today's environmentalists, as little more than the needful rape of earth's seamless fabric for human gain.  The other more orthodox view is founded in the tradition of Christianity and Judaism, that God gave man lordship over the earth and the right to exploit its riches.  In between, however, we might consider the subtler notion of stewardship, that the globe is not wholly ours to make or mar, but something to respect and conserve as well as develop.  At the end, Sworder offers a reflection on the mining of radioactive substances.  This has fashioned a Pandora's box, the opening of which, since Los Alamos, has more than once threatened to destroy us all.

WORK

Essential to Sworder's discussion is the sub-theme of work, which has been so much part of the elevation or degradation of human life for millennia.  In these days of huge excavators and open-cut mining we experience little of the magic and the peril facing miners in past centuries who had only primitive tools and the raw courage of their bodies to sustain them.  Gone too is the sense of direct contact in the shaping of stone and metals as builders experienced it only a few generations ago.  The author does not advance his comments this far however.  He confines himself to some great historic debates about materials, their purposes and the roles of those who employ them.  He devotes a whole chapter to the symbol of the mine and the legends of those men and creatures -- men, dragons, dwarfs, et al who have inhabited the underworld.

As befits a scholar with some Christian background, the author devotes his largest chapter to the biblical tradition.  This extends from the concepts of God (and gods) as artificers held by Egyptians, Greeks and Hebrews to the Middle Ages where Abbot Suger of St Denis, the spiritual father of the Gothic building, was at odds with the austerity of St Bernard of Clairvaux.  There is also a fascinating chapter on the Desacrilisation of Work which shows how Northern Europe in the latter half of the 18th century became the nub of a debate about the effects upon work and workers of the early Industrial Revolution.  William Blake's fiery complaints about the effect of "dark satanic mills" upon "England's green and pleasant land" are well known.  But Sworder shows how even the milder impact of Wordsworth and the Romantics, who retreated into nature rather than crusading against its despoilers, has continued to haunt the mining and forestry industries even to the present day.

The author puzzles over, but does not venture to pick a quarrel with the metaphysical embrace of the earth by Australia's Aborigines.  Prior to this generation, nobody worried much about the excavation of humanly unproductive desert regions for valuable metals.  With a revived spirit of native religiosity (some of it sincere, some merely expedient) since the Mabo decision, this has become a different story.  Sworder's book is a valuable reminder that mining can no longer be regarded as the winning of a resource without regard to the contrary world view of those who now condemn the archaic understanding of Genesis.  This has taught that humanity has the right to devour earth's substance even for short-term gain.

A weakness of the author's "stories" is that he often strays from his title theme into a more general discussion of historic community beliefs.  This is very noticeable in the chapter on the biblical tradition.  Indeed, one cannot help comparing Sworder's work with the more cohesive, locally pertinent account by Robert Raymond, Out of the Fiery Furnace (Macmillan 1985).  Assuredly these two are very different books.  Sworder prefers to deal with cultural resonances and intimations rather than giving us a continuous account.  Yet some mention of the Chinese as the world's earliest and greatest metallurgists up to Ming times would not have gone amiss.

For all its apparent discontinuities, this book still offers an excellent read.  It reminds us that the quarrel between environmentalist and entrepreneur is not some recent fad, but a very ancient dispute.  This is still a long way from being resolved.