I
Outside is warmer than the air-conditioned car and my feet begin to thaw as I cross the dirt-road with camera in hand. The sign reading ‘wedding’, a wooden plank shaped into an arrow and adorned by a glass bottle dangling from a nail, points to a ramshackle barn with rusted corrugated iron roof standing next to some scattered trees. Behind this I can just make out the substantially more salubrious premises within which, presumably, said weddings are to take place. My companion has pulled over the car so that I can get a shot of what she assures me is a pretty regular sight in this part of Australia. We have been driving around the Hunter Region of New South Wales, an area that extends from 120 km to 310 km north of Sydney. The Hunter Valley is famed for, amongst other things, horse breeding and wine production, and we are currently on a stretch dominated by the latter. While many notable Australian wine brands are still produced in the region, since the 1990s a co-dependent tourist industry has been developed around the vineyards, attracting streams of Sydneysiders north for weekend breaks that encompass wine tasting in carefully sculpted landscapes of rolling hills, winding dirt roads, and miles of vines housing upmarket hotels, along with faux-rustic venues like the one that I have stopped to photograph.
The Australian summer has been tentatively announcing its presence this year and today is cloudy but warm. I finish photographing and we resume our journey, the air-conditioner summarily resuming to freeze my feet. We’ve been driving through ‘blink and you miss it’ towns filled with detached houses, convenience stores that have seen better days, and oddly ubiquitous hotels that all look like replicas of Wild West Saloons. We pass through the sanitised vineyard territory into the slightly less manicured landscape of smaller growers. These too peel away to reveal a stretch of highway through the bush, upon which road-kill kangaroo carcases are strewn every hundred meters of so, and we are marveling at the levels of carnage when the Hunter’s other defining feature creeps up on us unawares: as we turn a bend on the road an open-cut coal mine comes into view. (more…)
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Progressive Economy
Ireland after NAMA 
December 18, 2012
Mining the boom and finding a bubble in the land down under
Posted by irelandafternama under #Commentaries, Uncategorized | Tags: Australia, economic policy, Emigration, Mining |1 Comment
I
Outside is warmer than the air-conditioned car and my feet begin to thaw as I cross the dirt-road with camera in hand. The sign reading ‘wedding’, a wooden plank shaped into an arrow and adorned by a glass bottle dangling from a nail, points to a ramshackle barn with rusted corrugated iron roof standing next to some scattered trees. Behind this I can just make out the substantially more salubrious premises within which, presumably, said weddings are to take place. My companion has pulled over the car so that I can get a shot of what she assures me is a pretty regular sight in this part of Australia. We have been driving around the Hunter Region of New South Wales, an area that extends from 120 km to 310 km north of Sydney. The Hunter Valley is famed for, amongst other things, horse breeding and wine production, and we are currently on a stretch dominated by the latter. While many notable Australian wine brands are still produced in the region, since the 1990s a co-dependent tourist industry has been developed around the vineyards, attracting streams of Sydneysiders north for weekend breaks that encompass wine tasting in carefully sculpted landscapes of rolling hills, winding dirt roads, and miles of vines housing upmarket hotels, along with faux-rustic venues like the one that I have stopped to photograph.
The Australian summer has been tentatively announcing its presence this year and today is cloudy but warm. I finish photographing and we resume our journey, the air-conditioner summarily resuming to freeze my feet. We’ve been driving through ‘blink and you miss it’ towns filled with detached houses, convenience stores that have seen better days, and oddly ubiquitous hotels that all look like replicas of Wild West Saloons. We pass through the sanitised vineyard territory into the slightly less manicured landscape of smaller growers. These too peel away to reveal a stretch of highway through the bush, upon which road-kill kangaroo carcases are strewn every hundred meters of so, and we are marveling at the levels of carnage when the Hunter’s other defining feature creeps up on us unawares: as we turn a bend on the road an open-cut coal mine comes into view. (more…)
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