Letter to The West, 14th December, 2010

In his letter headed “A pen or a shovel?” (14/12), David De Garis artfully paints himself as a noble, university educated man who toils away in the city for a wage that is dwarfed by that of poorly educated, fly-in fly-out workers in the resources industry. He asks which of the two paths a young man might follow these days.

David, like many other people not involved in the resources industry, you have drawn it very crudely, invoking visions of homogenous clusters of “workers” getting on planes to “the mines” and returning with fistfuls of cash. You draw attention to the sacrifices you made by going to university, unconscious of the fact that many people boarding such planes are either university educated themselves or are qualified tradesmen – and only a brave man would tell a tradesman that he has not also made sacrifices during his four-year apprenticeship.

So the very basis of your letter - the idea that a university education and the resources industry are mutually exclusive – is completely inaccurate. For thousands of people, including myself, “pens and shovels” are interchangeable. I have a degree and often work in the city, but I also love being hundreds of kilometres from anywhere, covered in flies, and hitting rocks with a hammer.

Regardless of their level of education or training, people in the resources industry take a risk by working in what history shows is a boom-bust game. And as a white-collar professional, I am sure you appreciate that with risk can come reward – in this case, financial. The flipside to the reward is  illustrated by events like BHP’s spectacular failure at Ravensthorpe and the subsequent mass sackings.

Finally David, all wage levels are fundamentally driven by supply and demand. If suburban white-collar wages are as pitifully low as you make out then how can anybody sensibly advocate for more people to enter these professions? I think your hypothetical young man should do exactly what he wants to do, not bow to family or social pressures to become one breed or other of white-collar worker. And if he hasn’t the faintest idea what to do, he should do what I did: become a geologist.