MOVING A MOUNTAIN

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 3, Issue 695, 22 November 1933, Page 2

MOVING A MOUNTAIN

BROKEN HILL COMPANY AT WORK ON IRON MONARCH. HUGE ORE DEPOSIT. Adelaide, November 7. The Bfoken Hill Proprietary Co. is slowly but surely removing a mountain near the head of Spencer Gulf, South Australia, and thereby supplying^ one of A^s^ralia's greatest' secondary indu^tries with its raw materia.1. The mountain is Iron Monarch, a huge ridge of almost pure iron ore which rises like a guardian from the sea of scanty scrub bordering th'e shores of the gulf. In the last 18 years more than nine million tons of ore has been won. Already part of the summit of the ridge, of which Iron Knob is but a portion, has been levelled, but daily it is disappearing under the onslaughts of electric shovels capable of removing 400 tons of rock an hour. As it is hewn from the mountain sid , the ore is conveyed to crushers, and then gravitates to bins whence it is released into trueks in which it is drawn by powerful locomotives over a private railway line, between 30 and 40 miles long, to the port of Wihyalla. There it is carried on a conveyor belt along a pier and deposited in the holds of a ship. A 5000-ton vessel can berth at midnight and leave at daylight with its h'olds full. Its destination is the company's iron and steel works at Newcastle.