The history of the Pilbara is distinctive, but its contours are those of Australian history in miniature. Successive resource booms have saddled that part of Western Australia with the weight of immense national expectation. The rise and fall of trade unionism was compressed into a few short decades in the Pilbara’s iron ore mines, where compulsory unionism once made workers immensely powerful, and where the decline in union membership now leaves them highly exposed to managerial agendas.
Of course, First Nations history underwrites the whole landscape. Aboriginal people have lived in the Pilbara for more than 40,000 years and the region’s voluminous petroglyphic rock art is, or ought to be, a national treasure.
Striking Ore: The rise and fall of union power in the Pilbara by Alexis Vassiley
Monash University Publishing, $39.99 pb, 277 pp
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