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Overheating
An Anthropology of Accelerated Change
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Identity Destabilised
Living in an Overheated World
Edited by Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Elisabeth Schober
Mining Encounters
Extractive Industries in an Overheated World
Edited by Robert Jan Pijpers and Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Boomtown
Runaway Globalisation on
the Queensland Coast
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
First published 2018 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Thomas Hylland Eriksen 2018
The right of Thomas Hylland Eriksen to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3827 9 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 3826 2 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7868 0306 1 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0308 5 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0307 8 EPUB eBook
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed
and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are
expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Abbreviations viii
Preface ix
Prologue: The High Point of Extractive Industrialism xiv
PART I CITIUS, ALTIUS, FORTIUS
1. A City No Longer in Waiting 3
The First Century 5
Queensland Alumina Ltd and Beyond 9
The Expanding Port and the LNG Adventure 11
Promotion of the Gladstone Region 17
2. Australian Identity and Its Double Binds 20
The Cultural Grammar of Australia Day 20
Egalitarianism and Inequality 24
Diversity, Exclusion and Hierarchy 29
Mining and Pastoralism in Australian Identity 35
Water and the Double Bind 39
3. Change in Their Bones 44
Living Amid Accelerated Change 47
The FIFO Issue 50
Accelerated Structural Amnesia 57
A Module-based Identity 61
Ambivalence 64
Temporality and the Future 67
4. The Boomtown Syndrome and the Treadmill Paradox 72
The Boomtown 74
Gladstone as a Boomtown 77
Gladstone and Treadmill Capitalism 98
vi . boomtown
PART II CLASHING SCALES
5. Green Voices 109
Environmental Ambivalence at the Epicentre 111
The Gladstone Conservation Council 116
Silencing and Ambivalence 120
A Typology of Environmental Engagement 122
Scale and Green Activism 132
Corporate Social Responsibility: Offsets and Lightning
Conductors 135
6. Dredging the Harbour 145
Positioned Knowledge and Unequal Power 149
The End of Commercial Fishing in Gladstone 151
Conflicting Expert Knowledges 157
The Bund Wall Scandal 161
Trust, Power and Knowledge 168
7. Slow-Burning Overheating at the East End Mine 171
The Mine and the Farmers 173
The East End Mine Action Group 175
Knowledge about Mount Larcom Water 177
Scale, Knowledge and Power 183
Alec Lucke’s Story 186
8. The Demise of Targinnie 190
Fruit and Industry 191
Shale Oil: The End of Targinnie 193
Retrospections 199
Scaling Up and Cooling Down 212
9. Clashing Scales: Globalisation, as We Know It 217
Epilogue: A Boomtown in Decline 229
Appendix 1: Anna Hitchcock’s submission regarding the further
expansion of the State Development Area in Gladstone in 2014 232
Appendix 2: Letter to Coordinator-General from Cheryl Watson 233
Bibliography 235
Index 242
List of Illustrations
figures
1.1 The GAPDL logo gives pride of place to the sky and the
ocean, while industry is granted a mere speck 19
3.1 From Vicki Johnson’s installation Crime Scene (2013) 60
3.2 From Vicki Johnson’s installation Crime Scene (2013) 60
3.3 From Vicki Johnson’s installation Crime Scene (2013) 61
6.1 Dredge spoil leaking out of the bund wall in 2011 148
6.2 Before and after dredging 162
6.3 Private photo from Gladstone harbour 164
7.1 East End Mine Action Group protest poster against QCL
mine expansion 171
maps
0.1 Australia, with Gladstone located between Bundaberg and
Rockhampton xv
1.1 Gladstone on the Queensland coast 4
2.1 The Gladstone region 21
3.1 Existing and projected major industrial operations in
Gladstone in 2015 48
6.1 Location of Gladstone in relation to the LNG terminals
and Fisherman’s Landing, indicating the shipping channel
about to be doubled and extended following dredging 147
Abbreviations
ABC Australian Broadcasting Corporation
APLNG Asia Pacific LNG
CBD central business district
CSR corporate social responsibility
CVA Conservation Volunteers Australia
EEMAG East End Mine Action Group
EIS Environmental Impact Statement
EQIP Education Queensland Industry Partnership
FIFO fly-in fly-out
GAPDL Gladstone Area Promotion and Development Limited
GCC Gladstone Conservation Council
GLNG Gladstone LNG
GPC Gladstone Ports Corporation
GRC Gladstone Regional Council
GREAN Gladstone Regional Environmental Advisory Network
LNG liquid natural gas
NGO non-governmental organisation
NIMBY not in my back yard
NSW New South Wales
QAL Queensland Alumina Ltd
QCL Queensland Cement & Lime
QCLNG Queensland Curtis LNG
QGC Queensland Gas Company
SDA State Development Area
SPP Southern Pacific Petroleum
STS Studies of Technology and Society
WIN Welcome International Neighbours
Preface
This book is an outcome of ethnographic research carried out as part of
the European Research Council Advanced Grant project ‘Overheating:
The three crises of globalisation, or an anthropological history of the
early 21st century’, ‘Overheating’ for short, running from 2012 to 2017.
The project’s aim has been to explore and account for local responses to
global, accelerated change through a number of case studies from around
the world – Peru, Canada, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Western Europe, Sierra
Leone, Australia – plus more than a dozen smaller projects carried out
by MA students doing fieldwork in as many locations, from Corsica to
Nepal. Although it is based on ethnographic studies and carried out by
anthropologists, the project has interdisciplinary ambitions, aiming to
bring statistics, political economy, macrosociology and history to bear
on the anthropological microdata. Just as the phenomena we study are
multiscalar, so are our research methods.
In an early position paper (Eriksen 2013), I explained overheating as
follows:
The accelerated and intensified contact which is a defining charac-
teristic of globalisation leads to tensions, contradictions, conflict and
changed opportunities in ways that affect identity, the environment
and the economy.… change takes place unevenly, but often fast and as
a result of a peculiar combination of local and transnational processes.
Such forms of change lead to ‘overheating effects’ in local settings
worldwide: Unevenly paced change where exogenous and endogenous
factors combine to lead to instability, uncertainty and unintended
consequences in a broad range of institutions and practices, and
contribute to a widely shared feeling of powerlessness and alienation.
People perceive, understand and act upon the changes in widely
differing ways depending on their position in the locality (class, age,
gender, etc.) and on the characteristics of the locality as well as its
position within regional, national and transnational systems. In order
to understand globalisation, it is necessary to explore how its crises
are being dealt with in local contexts – how people resist imposed
changes, negotiate their relationship to global and transnational forces,
and which strategies for survival, autonomy and resistance are being
developed. These explorations must take the genius loci of the locality
