The following reflection is by Peter McCarthy, Managing Director at AMC Consultants:

I collect old mining books. My best finds have been made in Perth, Harare, North Bay and other towns that service a broad mining hinterland. In my home city, Melbourne, I find books from Victoria’s gold era, but otherwise the pickings are slim. I am just getting into eBay.

Some books have provenance; a copperplate inscription “Mine Manager, Wiluna, 1913” or “Ballarat School of Mines 1896” on an inside page. Some have an unusual history, like copies of “The Mining Journal”, “The Industrial Australian and Mining Standard” and “The Engineer” which I rescued from an underground level of the Broken Hill South mine that I visited with AMC’s Paul Gardner. They were all I could carry in the front of my overalls; I left dozens of volumes behind.

Mining books are rarely expensive. They are so unsought that they often lie in cardboard boxes in back rooms of secondhand bookshops, and one must ask for them to be brought out. There are specialist bookshops for enthusiasts on railways, military history, computers and, of course, pornography, but not on mining. Until about 20 years ago, the Victorian Department of Mines sold back-copies of old reports for a dollar or two. My copies of annual reports from the 19th century and special reports on the goldfields are now rarities. I wish I had had the foresight to buy all that were offered.

My favorite historical characters were the great men and rogues of the mining industry, often one and the same. I have both biographies of the bloated Horatio Bottomley who fleeced investors in West Australian Loan and General Finance Corporation, Associated Gold Mines of Western Australia and several other companies while living in London almost entirely on champagne. I have several biographies and autobiography of Herbert Hoover, the tireless self-promoter whose vision and ambitions were bigger than the mining industry. Perhaps one day I will find a biography of Whittaker Wright, the dominant figure in West Australian finance in London, who took poison in 1904 when convicted of deliberately falsifying company balance sheets.

Herbert Hoover is an abiding interest for me. He had the means and opportunity to rewrite his own life story, so some truths are buried deep. His success with Sons of Gwalia is well known, the failures at Lancefield and in Victoria less so. I would like one day to explore the story of the Consolidated Deep Leads, which Hoover called “the greatest pumping operation in mining history”, and which cost its shareholders millions for no return.

JH Curle was a mining engineer and successful travel writer. His views on eugenics made him a pariah when the Nazis rose to power. His books are a mix of humorous personal and mining history, observant travel experience and racism. Of his degree at Cambridge he wrote: “The University authorities were approached as to a mining course, but it was soon evident they knew rather less of mining than I did; it was outside their ken. It ended in a scratch course in geology, chemistry, and hydrostatics; but of their practical bearing on mining I learned nothing, and left the University in complete ignorance of the profession I hoped to enter.” Curle, a friend of Hoover, traveled the world for years as a mining journalist for The Economist and wrote “The Gold Mines of the World” to much industry acclaim.

Randolph Bedford was a mining reporter and also a popular writer; his “Billy Pagan, Mining Engineer” (1911) is a rarity on my wish list. Fortunately his autobiography “Naught to Thirty-Three” was republished in 1976 and is readily available. Alf “Smiler” Hales was also a mining reporter at the beginnings of Broken Hill and later author of more than fifty novels. Many of them are written in dialect and, to me, are largely incomprehensible unless read aloud.

There are many, many other industry characters who wrote down their lives. Some, like WS Robinson, G Lindesay Clark, JR Gray and Oscar Comettant were published in their own time. The tradition continues with “Hardrock Gold” by Tom Morrison, a mining engineer whose career began in the early 1970s but who has the skill to write about the industry as I remember it thirty years ago.

We owe a tremendous debt to our contemporaries who have published memoirs that were otherwise lost. To Ron Manners for “So I Headed West” by WH Manners, to Ian Hore-Lacey for “Broken Hill to Mt Isa” by WH Corbould and to several others. Some of the most interesting stories, like Richard Pope’s diaries of mining in Cornwall, America, Ballarat, Bendigo and Broken Hill, can only be found only in manuscript form in library historical collections and await a wider audience.

I was fortunate to discover Geoffrey Blainey’s work early. He has made the greatest single contribution to my mining library and to setting down Australia’s mining history. There were others helping to cover the field; Ian Auhl in South Australia, Kett Kennedy in Queensland and Weston Bate in Victoria. Many local histories such as “Angor to Zillmanton” by Colin Hooper, “Gold at Gaffneys Creek” by Brian Lloyd and Howard Combes, “Nothing But Gold” by Robyn Annear or “The Mile That Midas Touched” by Gavin Casey and Ted Mayman are examples of this genre. A list of such local histories would be very long.

Then there are the mining novels. My collection includes “Golden Soak” by Hammond Innes, “The Barrier” by Ken Walker, “Gold Mine” by Wilbur Smith and “Twenty Fourth Level” by Kenneth Benton. All could be described as “underground escapism”.

The humorous books include “And There’s Gold Out There” by Ed Waller and “The Pitt Street Prospector” by Blue Garland. There aren’t many, although “The Money Miners” by Trevor Sykes still makes me smile about a serious matter.

As I look at my bookshelves I realize that I have mentioned only a few titles and authors. All of the old textbooks on mining, prospecting and assaying are of interest. The recent conference volumes on mining history, industrial and engineering history and industrial archaeology are valued references. I even have a mining textbook in Russian, given to me in Tashkent, which has better colour illustrations than any mining textbook in English.

There must be many books waiting for me to discover them. The investment is small and the pleasure they bring is great.