The Well-Paid—and Lonely—Australian Miner
In one coal town, 23 bachelors for each single woman
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A short walk from Australia’s largest open-pit gold mine, 35-year-old driller Matt Brown swigs a beer in the Rock Inn Hotel and laments one of his biggest problems: “You get lonely,” he says of life in dusty Kalgoorlie, 600 kilometers (373 miles) from Perth, the capital of Western Australia. “Relationships are the hardest thing about mining.”
The heartache in places like Kalgoorlie and the Queensland coal town of Glenden, which has 23 bachelors in their 40s for each single woman, is a headache for companies like Rio Tinto Group that are trying to attract recruits. “It’s a wonderful life for many, but for many people there’s a crippling isolation,” says Gervase Greene, a Perth-based spokesman for Rio Tinto’s iron-ore operations.