Mining hard hats, trucks, and pretty ladies
My April 1 resolution: never again read a magazine, blog, or newspaper bedecked with a picture of a drill rig, a big truck, or worse, a young lady in a hard hat in front of a mining truck. Imagine my chagrin and rage on seeing this photo, which accompanies a gushing article from Australia. I cannot resist breaking my April 1 resolution and copying it here.
There is an appalling tendency for young, impressionable journalists to splash the lady (gal/girl/dame), the hard hat, and the big truck all over their naive findings. Damn it, I was in Fort McMurray last week and the trucks moving materials on my oil sands project were driven by so great a diversity of people, that I could have bespattered pages gushing about driver diversity. But I promise I won’t; all I record is the happy thought that the reality of the mining industry has gotten ahead of the prejudiced ignorance of newly minted journalists and the rout images.
I submit that it is good that hard hats and ladies are no longer news worthy of pictures or words. We can and should revel in this; but damn me, we do not need to replicate ever bad picture we see of ladies and hard hats and trucks. Now is time to move on to create art of this topic. For artists capture the essence of the times in which they work, don’t they?
2 comments
About 10 years ago, the head of Women in Mining was a woman in her 50s who drove a large haul truck at one of the open pit mines in northern Nevada. Last September, at the annual convention of the Nevada Mining Association, a haul truck driver was honored at her retirement: 40 years of driving for the industry. Not a young gal, but certainly competent and would have preferred to continue working into her late 60s and beyond.
Gender doesn’t seem to be an issue in mining. Don’t know why the Australian story was even published. It could not have been _that_ slow a news day there.
Rich
My mom used to do something like this and it was really fun to hear about. If any of you know how to mine, I have a project and could use some information.
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