This time I’m invited

J N Pierce was a doyen among mining and energy writers in Australia for many years until his retirement from the Sydney Morning Herald in 1985. Last year, aged 85, he revisited Argyle Diamonds’ Smoke Creek site and now looks back to his adventurous infiltration soon after the first diamond discoveries there in 1979.

A quarter of a century on, some things in this timeless land of the East Kimberley had not changed.

The obese boab trees, migrants from Africa dating back to the days of Gondwanaland, the spinifex dotted with anthills standing like ghostly gravestones, the wedge tailed eagles effortlessly riding the thermals in an autumn morning’s 40 degree heat.

But in front of me, in a breathtaking transformation from a crater of rocky outcrops and sparse scrub when I first saw it, was the yawning pit of the mine that turned the diamond world on its ear in the 1980s and became a legend in its own time.

The first time I had been here was in 1979 as a mining journalist following through on exploration reports that seemed to indicate the discovery of something outstanding in the long term of Australian mining. In a needle in the haystack search exercise, I tracked down the discovery site – but, as I’ll explain, I was not one bit welcome. Now, as an invited guest of Argyle Diamonds, I was privileged to see first hand the outcome since those days.