Broken Hill's new mineral wealth may lie beneath the tip Reporter: Mike Sexton
KERRY O'BRIEN: 120 years ago, the outback town of Broken Hill was founded on the world's biggest deposit of silver, lead and zinc ore. At one stage, more than 6,000 men worked underground; now down to just 500, and geologists say the current mine will face closure. While Broken Hill's economy has now diversified, there's still a belief that there's another massive ore body waiting to be discovered - a find that would return to the city to its former glory, which is why everyone is keeping an eye on the new test drilling site in, of all places, the city's tip. Mike Sexton reports from the Silver City.
MIKE SEXTON: This just might be the ugliest work site in the country. Under an angry sun, with a fierce desert wind collecting the stench of carcasses and squadrons of blowflies, these men are drilling core samples at the Broken Hill tip, trying to win the equivalent of the mining lottery.
LEIGH BETTANY (GEOLOGIST, SIPA RESOURCES): If we're right, then potentially we're looking at the discovery of another Broken Hill ore body, which was found 100 years ago, more than 100 years ago now, and could be worth upwards of AU$25 billion for our company.
MIKE SEXTON: The project is the result of an aerial gravity survey that shows a heavy-looking lode several hundred metres underground that geologists think could be lead and zinc.
LEIGH BETTANY: It's been known about as a gravity anomaly for many years, and it's been speculated on, but nobody's put a drill rig on the top and drilled it, which is what we're currently doing.
MIKE SEXTON: The current mine at Broken Hill is expected to run for only a few more years, so the thought that there could be more life in the old ore body is big news for a town that's become a byword for mining.
RON PAGE (BROKEN HILL MAYOR): Yes, it has registered on the scale, the possibility it could be there. We all know the whole area is mineralised and there's a lot there still to be found.
MIKE SEXTON: For 122 years, miners headed up to a mile underground to bring out a fortune of silver, lead and zinc, and along the way, the outback mine changed the nation.
IAN PLYMER (PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY, MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY): Broken Hill's the biggest lead/zinc/silver ore body in the world, and the silver from Broken Hill was so rich that when BHP started here on the 18th of August 1885, they mined silver, and that's why Broken Hill's called the Silver City, and the mine was so rich that it changed Australia from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy.
MIKE SEXTON: But by the mid 1970s, the ore body seemed spent. Thousands of miners lost their jobs as mines became uneconomic, and the Silver City seemed to be losing its luster.
SCOTT HOWE (OUTBACK AREA CONSULTATIVE COMMITTEE): The town's changed a lot in the last 30 years. We relied very heavily on mining for our economic base back in the '70s, and it probably accounted for some 75 per cent of the economic base, and over the last 30 years, that's probably subsided and it's now about a quarter or so with mining.
MIKE SEXTON: While Broken Hill lost up to a third of its population, those who stayed discovered there was life after mining. The city remained a service and retail centre, added an art industry and sold itself as a grand location for commercials and films such as 'Priscilla Queen of the Desert'. But the biggest growth industry of all was tourism. Ron Schipanski spent 36 years in the mines and has been taking tourists down to his old work site for two decades.
RON SCHIPANSKI (TOUR GUIDE): Today there was five and two little girls from Iceland. See you later. There they are there. I've got a book on them. I know every tour I've done, and if I get someone from New York or Chicago or Norway or Sweden or Switzerland, I put 'em in me little book. Fascinating. Even Slovenia, Latvia - places you hardly hear about - they all come to this dry old joint. They like the old place.
MIKE SEXTON: But no matter how many movies are made or tourists entertained, Broken Hill is still a mining town, and nothing stirs the blood more than the thought that there's still more out there. Professor of Geology at Melbourne University Ian Plymer has worked on the Broken Hill lode for the best part of 40 years.
IAN PLYMER: These are zinc ores, very deep down. These are lower-grade ores. These are ores which previously the former miners might have known that they were there, but they didn't exploit them.
MIKE SEXTON: He firmly believes the theory that a new lode is always found in the shadow of the old head frame, and while, for a century, mining was so easy that there was hardly any need for a geologist, now the challenge is to find the remaining deposits and the techniques for getting at it.
IAN PLYMER: If there's a new exploration technique, you try it at Broken Hill; if there's a new metallurgical or mining technique, you try it at Broken Hill, and this in many ways is the future of Broken Hill: that there still is a very large amount of metal left next to the world's biggest ore body, and new technology one day should be able to extract this metal.
MIKE SEXTON: One example of how mining has changed is a mineral sands project being developed by BiMaxx Resources at Pooncarie, 200 kilometres south of Broken Hill. Soon, this 1,200-tonne cast iron and steel jigsaw will be assembled into a dredger and used to extract zircon and ilmanite.
SIMON FINNES (BIMAXX RESOURCES): Ilmanite products are primarily used to make pigment. They're a titaniphorous mineral and that mainly goes into paint, so paint, papers, sunscreen, make-ups. It's a basifier, so it just gives something a bit of substance.
MIKE SEXTON: Broken Hill's industrial history is what attracted the company to basing its operation in the city, and now it's promising millions of dollars for a processing plant here.
RON PAGE: The mineral sands project has come on board at the right time when this city needs a boost, so those mineral sands are very much in demand all around the world.
MIKE SEXTON: While the mineral sands project lies out of town, the aerial gravity survey has fueled the belief that the next ore body will be much closer to home, maybe even under the tip. In the next few weeks, the joint partners are likely to find out if they've discovered the mother lode or just spent $100,000 bagging rocks.
RON SCHIPANSKI: That's unbelievable. That won't happen. You'd never get another lode like this. It's the biggest in the world. You can't have two here like this.
KERRY O'BRIEN: All that potential wealth under the garbage guarded by the blowies! That report from Mike Sexton.
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