In Search of Mineral Wealth

Description

This book is a great publication, a black hard with a blue dust jacket containing 359 pages including the index.

Rocks and minerals were used in South Australia many thousands of years before European settlement. Some of the first manufactured items in South Australia were undoubtedly of mineral origin. Chalcedony, flint, slate and other rocks and minerals were fashioned into tools and weapons in the open-air ‘factories’ of the Aborigines who, as hunters and collectors of food, depended on such implements for survival.

The most extensive use of minerals has been made, however, since the European occupation of South Australia. The process of mining ores precedes the manufacturing of materials and mining has always played integral part of any society’s economic, social and activities. It has become fundamental to the modern way of life because of the dependence on industrialisation in many societies since the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century.

This is not a history of the mines of South Australia.

Another publication by the same aothor Bernard O’Neil is “Above and Below“.