1967GOLDEN SANDS

[Music] [Music] It's good to get away from it all. Any summer, the coastal dwelling natives can be observed at their quaint holiday customs, keeping themselves up like colonies of seals, painting their bodies against the sun, and taking part in the well-known educational hobby of bird watching them perhaps for the brownbacked honey eater or the Tory breasted sandpiper. [Music] Away from the more popular resorts, our coastline has hundreds of miles of lonely beaches. And in recent years, some of these have become the setting not for holidays, but for the work a day [Music] world. The sand under your feet is nothing more or less than pulverized rock. Millions of years erosion in coastal ranges has carried the sand to the ocean bar where the surf and the winds and the offshore currents continually beat it about and wash it back and forth on the shore. If you analyzed sand, you'd find traces of just about every rock mineral on the Earth's crust, even gold, and semi-precious ones like garnet and turmoline. Most of them, however, in too small a quantity to be worth the trouble of extracting. But thanks to the particular composition of our coastal ranges, Australia's eastern and western beaches have some of the world's largest reserves of three minerals very worth mining indeed. Routtile, zirkon, and ilmanite, and a few rarer ones thrown in. In the last 20 years or so, the mining and treatment of sand minerals has become an industry worth millions of dollars. Why? What's the magic of this stuff? Black as cold dust and a good deal heavier. Ironically, rootile and ilmanite are the raw materials for the whitest pigment so far discovered, titanium oxide. It has a covering power 10 times as great as white lead. It's non-poisonous and chemically stable. The paint industry is one of the largest customers for titanium oxide. Plastics, color printing, and cosmetics are others. Routtile is also a source of titanium, a metal with an unusual combination of lightness and strength, which has caused quite a stir among metallurgists and engineers and is already being used in rockets and in spacecraft. But in case you're thinking of setting out with a spade and a wheelbarrow, extracting the wonder minerals for commercial use isn't quite so easy. The industry has developed several different methods to suit local conditions. In one method, a dredge floats in a man-made pond, sucking up sand and water alike, putting them through a primary separation process and discharging the sand from which all the wanted minerals have been removed. In Western Australia, they've discovered rich mineral seams well in land on ancient sea coasts from which the ocean has long receded. Here, they use a slooing process to dislodge the mineralbearing sands. In yet other localities, heavy earth moving equipment removes the overburden and takes out the sands beneath. [Music] Much of the machinery used in the dredging and separation of sand minerals has been either invented or developed by Australian technologists. In fact, about a dozen other countries buy it from us. A multi-million dollar processing plant in Queensland finds it economical with new methods to mine sand formerly considered too low in heavy mineral content. From all that effort, one small pile of minerals, but one worth a heap of money. [Music] After their preliminary sorting, these so-called heavy minerals go through a separation plant. They're separated one from the other by processes which ingeniously take advantage of gravity, electrical tension, and magnetism. [Music] [Applause] [Music] The end results are very high quality, very highly concentrated minerals. Australia produces over 90% of the world's routile and 60% of the world's ilmanite. And there's not much chance of the supply running out in a hurry. Our reserves of routile are estimated at hundreds of millions of tons. Our shipping terminals use fast handling techniques and a fast turnaround. Markets in the United States, Japan, Great Britain, Germany, Holland, Sweden, Italy, France, Poland, China. All these countries want our sand minerals and the demand is growing. [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] In the past, there have been protests from the public that sand mining damages the beaches. that their natural beauty has been scarred or destroyed. But now mining leases are granted only on very strict conditions, particularly in the eastern states. And these conditions are that the company leave the area in as good a state, if not better, than they found it. Mining companies have become enthusiastic about beautifification schemes. Some run their own nurseries, and all of them plant seeds and grasses and fertilize the land. [Music] Sand, not one substance, but many. Sand into metal. Titanium, the wonder metal. So light, so strong, so resistant to the corrosion of body fluids that it makes an artificial hip joint. or an artificial heart [Music] valve. Sand into rootile, which provides a coating for welding rods. Particularly important in the ship building industry. [Music] sand into monazite, one of the rarer minerals. A newly discovered derivative of monazite gives a truer red and sharper image to color [Music] television. Sand into thorium, another derivative of monazite and a radioactive breeder material. [Music] Sand into zirkcon used in foundaries as a mold facer and also as a mold wash. When a mold has been given a zirkon wash, the casting from it needs little or no machining. Zirkon is made into non-tarnishing jewelry. [Music] sand into titanium oxide, the hiding pigment. And that metal titanium again, its ability to withstand intense heat and to be alloyed with other metals. Its lightweight combined with tremendous strength. These qualities make it the main structural metal of supersonic aircraft. In jet engines and aircraft frames, it's estimated to save the weight of five passengers or half a ton of freight on each [Music] flight. Sand mining, an industry still young by mining standards, one not much more than 30 years old, and one deeply involved in tomorrow's world. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music]