Miners want town hill

Press, 10 August 1985, Page 21

Miners want town hill

By

NEILL BIRSS

The Martha Hill battle between goldminers and greenies shows that political overburden is as important to mining as overlying rock. Martha Hill dominates Waihi, two hours drive from Auckland. Gold-bearing quartz ore was discovered at Waihi in 1878, and by 1880 there were a dozen claims. The Martha Mine began in 1879, and 11 reefs carrying gold and silver were worked before the mine closed in 1952. Many older Waihi people worked in their youth in the shafts and drives that weakened the whole hill, like borer in old timber.

The hill is dangerous with old shafts. The present small lake was created by

subsidence. The old Martha Mine was worked to 400 metres below sea level. The miners were so far down that the water they pumped out ran through the gutters of Waihi warm. Now the international joint venture, the Waihi Gold Company, is wading through a mountain of hearings, procedures, and other red tape, towards its goal. This is to scoop up the whole of Martha Hill, take its gold and silver, and leave a landscaped lake in the hill’s place. This will entail moving about 35 million tonnes of material. The company believes it can extract about $6OO million worth of gold and , silver, if it gets approval. Already it has spent SIOM, and the project manager, Mr Roger Craddock, believes that, if approval is gained, SIOOM will be spent before the first gold and silver is recovered. The public can invest in the Martha Hill venture through Mineral Resources, which has a 27 per cent holding in the venture (not, as yet, a limited-liability company). The other shareholders are: O Amax Exploration (N.Z.), Ltd, a subsidiary of the American mining multinational, Amax, 38.33 per cent. • Green and Cahill Mining, Ltd, a subsidiary of the Auckland firm, Green and McCahill Industries, Ltd. • Goodman Mining, Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Goodman Group, 15 per cent. • United Gold Mines, Ltd, a subsidiary of a subsidiary of the British financial and banking group, Barclays International. Waihi Gold Mining hopes to be in a final tribunal hearing for a mining licence incorporating water rights in about 12 months. “It could be sooner: it could well be a lot longer,” the project manager, Mr Craddock, told journalists at a recent briefing at Waihi. The company has produced a four-volume, 700page environmental impact report, but still has a long way to go before mining can begin. It must satisfy the local bodies who control the land where tailing will be dumped; assure acclimatisation groups that fish will not be poisoned by leaching from the wastes; and go through hearings at a clump of ad hoc authorities controlling drainage, catchments, water, and planning. An Australian expert on leaching from mine dumps has been retained. A New Zealand dam consultant has checked the design of the walls that will hold the tailings. The Amax executives of the Waihi company concede that taking care of the

environment is part of mining engineering in all developed countries. But overseas miners must have tears well in their eyes from the New Zealand administrative onion with its layer after layer of authorities and tribunals, hearings and appeals, local bodies and Government departments. The Waihi Gold Company has taken a twin strategy. In its functional mining headquarters on the edge of Waihi, there are the usual core samples, maps showing the reef structure of the hill, and flooring suitable for workers with mud on their boots. But there are also expensive models of what Waihi would look like with its lake shores landscaped. The day of the new conference there were also the consultants and the corporate public relations staff from Auckland. A well-made video pro-

duced by the public relations people put the case for the mining, subtly. On Martha Hill, the visitors were shown trial plots of various grasses and trees, in experiments to find the best vegetation for restoring the mine waste. As elsewhere in the region, everything seemed to be thriving. Over from the hill more vegetation experiments are being made on old tailings. Here the atmosphere is more bleak. The vegetation struggles to thrive. There are few birds. But things do grow, slowly. The company has monitored noise levels in Waihi, and made a sociological study of the area. These have been taken into account in its mining plans, which will include a conveyer to move the material from the mine, keeping down truck noise, and curfew on vehicles as they gouge out the hill. There may be dust and

noise during the day, but Waihi will be a quiet town at night. A company executive acts as community relations officer, building up ties with the townspeople. Geologists are testing the dumping ground for fissures through which leaching from the mine wastes could leach, and exhaustive tests have been made on what might seep out of the WDctpC The ’ Waihi Gold Company’s mining would, after 15 years or so, leave the township more beautiful. Martha Hill is at present battered and dangerous. The new lake would be attractive. The damage was done by the first wave of mining. The second wave, thanks to the pressure from the environmentalists, should leave Waihi prettier than it has been for a century. The town needs the mine jobs for its young people. About 200 jobs are provided

by an electronics factory, and 40 by a lighting factory. Kiwifruit orchards also provide work, but there is still far too little.

It is likely that Waihi Gold Mining will eventually be permitted to mine. It has the staying power, and capital.

Is it economic? Mr Craddock says that with gold over ?NZ6SO the net return calculated meets the 10 per cent guideline the Government lays down for public projects. At under SNZ6OO it does not.

Other factors complicate the costing. The ore contains silver to gold in the ratio of about 10 to one, so its price must be taken into account, as must the fluctu-

ating New Zealand dollar. The executives of Waihi Goldmining are educated, quiet, and polite, a far cry from the adventurers who developed the South Island goldfields. But the practical entrepreneur could not cope with the bureaucracy as the multinational engineers and their consultants can. Small ventures are likely to find it increasingly hard to get into the pay dirt. One argument for bureaucratic discouragement of mining might be that gold in the ground is money in the bank for future generations. Let us hope this is wrong. Do we have to tear up hills and dig out the gold to be buried again in vaults on the other side of the world for economies to run? Sell the gold now, before everyone wakes up to its true value — in cents per ounce rather than dollars.

Unmined ore 'money in bank’