And now to a love of mine - Aboriginal Australia - where also diamonds are found....

Chapter 11 Wild Diamonds and Ancient Culture.

Some excerpts...

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... Northern Mining calculated that the top 200 metres alone contained about 800 million carats and that the deposit at 200 metres was still as rich as at the higher levels and clearly kept on going down deeper . From the results I obtained I calculated that the top 200 feet of this deposit contained as many diamonds as were publically known to exist in the rest of the world. South Africa's diamond reserves were estimated by the US Geological Survey at 200 million carats in 1980. Argyle most probably had over a billion carats.

I give many of the secret results of the drill tests - the figures are staggering - and throw light on what is in other mines.. such figures have never before been published - I give the detailed figures on sizes, colour, shape, purity - and numbers.

 

I was staggered by the implications. It seemed to me this mine could easily...

... The Warnum elders told me of the sacred women's place high in the Smoke Creek valley, saying it was of ancient and high ritual importance. It was precisely where the diamond pipe was located. From this sacred place, known as the Barramundi Dreaming Place, one could look out through a gap in the crater's rim over the flat flood plains of Limestone Creek to where the Barramundi in the 'dreamtime' came to rest as a hill on the far side of the valley. The barramundi is a large and delicious fish. It symbolised here one of the great creation or 'dreamtime' stories. It had deep spiritual significance but the uninitiated could only be told of it in a simple parable form designed for uninitiated children. Some said the diamonds were the scales of the fish. It was ironic that this women's place would be destroyed by a mine devoted to the production of 'a girl's best friend'.

..One of the Warnum elders, David Mowaljarlai on 14 May 1980 said of the Argyle diamond mine on his ancestral land:

'Disturbing sacred sites and land is agony or our people. Land and mountains and spring water - the heart of the sacred sites - is really our body. Grader, bulldozer are pressing down on our body, liver, kidney bleeding. The spirit of the landowners is sickened. Graders are scraping the skin off our flesh - a sore that will not heal up: in my language, 'wilu', killing us.' Ref. Massacres to Mining, by Jan Roberts p 148.

Diamonds thus became for them a symbol of death rather than of life. The support they received from organisations such as the Australian Council of Churches and the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace proved useless. This opposition could no more stop CRA than dew can stop a truck.

CRA made Smoke Creek valley into a forbidden zone, barred from the public and the world's press for over a year while they deliberated over how to market its fabulous contents. It was walled off with high fences, helicopter patrols and closed circuit television. However none of the guards at the sentry post by the high barred gate questioned the dust-covered 'Sheila', head-scarf tied gypsy style, sitting in the back of a truck on a well concealed camera with a party of Aborigines out hunting. They presumed I was either a 'do-gooder' worker at the Aboriginal settlement or a half-caste and waved us through the gate into Smoke Creek valley ....

... The Managing Director of the mine, Michael O'Leary, said the pit at Argyle would be 'the same size as the two largest South African mines put together.' CRA predicted at that time that they would mine about 22 million carats a year. World diamond production that year, 1982, was 48 million carats. In fact the Argyle mine by 1994 would be producing about 40 million carats a year. Philip Adams in the Melbourne Age called what the company was prepared to give Aborigines 'a pitiful barter of pocket knives, mirrors and beads for perhaps the richest piece of real estate on earth.' (Age October 11, 1980)

... I then was "leaked" the secret results of the exploration work at Argyle .,...