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Controversy has surrounded the investigation and eventual approval of three new mining projects in north-western Victoria. The prospect of significant disruption to cereal and oilseed cropping programs in fertile regions of the state has alarmed local farmers. Much of this protest is the prompted by self-interest, but it does no harm to the rest of us to take a closer look at the facts on the ground. This gives a broad impression of the deposits of rare earths and critical minerals that have been identified by exploratory drilling and survey. Only a portion of these areas have actually been selected under Retention Licence, which allows further specific and protected examination of sites by a mining company. And only a small fraction of these RLs have been granted an actual Mining Licence, committing each mining company to develop a mine and extract resource. GOSCHEN This map reveals the decreasing areas of land involved in the process of identifying, investigating and, finally, develo...

R. Brough Smyth, Secretary of the Colony of Victoria's Mines Department, first 'recommended that a competent officer be employed to construct a sketch map of the Cape Patterson coalfield' in South Gippsland ... 'Ferdinand Krause (1841-1918), Mining Surveyor, Ararat Division, was appointed to this task in December 1871 and in the next year continued with the Otway region and then commenced mapping the Ararat goldfield. Reginald Murray, now a mining surveyor, was instructed to survey the Sandhurst goldfield and followed on with Ballarat ... these officers were engaged fulltime in geological surveying, and late in 1873 Smyth was able to appoint Norman Taylor as a third geological surveyor.' (i) ARARAT GOLD FIELD (ii)  BALLARAT GOLD FIELD (ii)  CASTLEMAINE GOLD FIELD (iv)  BENDIGO GOLD FIELD

In considering the cause of particular wars (or causes of war in general) the available options can probably be distilled down to three ― Man, Machine, Moment. The decision to go to war (or stumble into it) usually involves a madman with grandiose ideas, or the arrival of a military weapon that changes the odds of winning, or the emergence of an obvious power imbalance between populations, (and most likely, elements of all three). As the historian Geoffrey Blainey has noted, the actual ignition of conflict requires someone, somewhere, to think they hold the advantage in one of these areas, sufficient to get away with aggression and be victorious, and BIFFO! its on. Such was the case in 1453 with the Sultan Mehmet II, Conqueror of Constantinople, and his super cannon Basilik . 1.  The Madman Alexander Christie-Millar, 2024, To the City: Life and Death Along the Ancient Walls of Istanbul , William Collins, London, p. 43, 49-50       "On that winter's day in Edirne, the...

Little seems to have really changed   in the past 1400 years of Islamic experience in the Middle East. Such is their attachment to the intimate intrigues of their religious beginning, that subsequent generations of Muslims appear compelled to re-enact the original resentments and betrayals. There is something almost de terministic about those early divisions, a personalised enmity that has endured, with destructive impact on the contemporary Arab world. This thread of argument, along with the multiple ethnic and imperial nationalisms (Arabian, Turkic, Persian) that have populated and contested the region since, are the subject of a challenging book by Barnaby Rogerson ― THE HOUSE DIVIDED : Sunni, Shia and the Making of the Middle East  (2024, Profile Books, London). It is a tragedy that the author suggests may have been foreseen by the Prophet Muhammad shortly before his death in 632 AD (632 CE or 'Common Era', 10 AH or 'After Hijrah'):          "Once ...