In 2021 I visited Kalgoorlie/Kulgooluh, on the traditional lands of the Wangkatja group of peoples in Western Australia. My niece was working as a geologist in a goldmine at Ora Banda, a little distance away from Kalgoorlie. The landscape of the region is ancient, flat and highly weathered with largely nutrient poor soils underlain by Archaean age continental granite greenstone bedrock of the Yilgarn craton.
I was astonished by the number of operational goldmines such as the one where my niece worked, that are grinding away at the ancient cratonic rocks to get the gold that makes up a mere 1 to 4 grams/tonne of ore. The super pit is a vast open cut gold mine next to Kalgoorlie which has a footprint larger than the township.
The landscape was strange and beautiful, it is so different to my home on Sydney sandstone surrounded by Angophora forests and the rich biodiversity of the plant communities in Guringai and Darkinjung country.
I read about the sandalwood trees that had once thrived in this region but now are carefully farmed or are specimen trees in an arboretum. Santalum spicatum is a hemi parasite requiring macro nutrients from the roots of hosts such as Acacia acuminata. The sandalwood and the acacia live together, communicating and sharing nutrients, as well as providing food for the marsupial species Bettongia penicillata (the woylie) which then assists in the dispersal of the seeds. This plant had been used sustainably by generations of indigenous inhabitants, but is now in a much reduced range and population because of overharvesting and land clearing since the 1890’s.
I have created a narrative in three parts to reveal my response to the story of the land around Ora Banda, indicating the complexity of the relationship between the geology that is 2.9 billion years old, the overlying vegetation in which the sandalwood trees thrived and the human desire for the riches held in both the rocks and the plants of the region.
The vegetation map of the Ora Banda area shows pre colonisation vegetation cover. Interwoven with this map is the chemical diagram of a sesquiterpene molecule – one of the main components of sandalwood oil – the liquid gold that led to the near extinction of the sandalwood forests.
The aerial view of the Ora Banda goldmine tapestry evokes a skull’s head and is self-explanatory, as is the small tapestry of a small branch of sandalwood flowers.