Diggers Diary: Golden rock defies Covid at Diggers & Dealers
Mining Veteran Peter Cook is scheduled to take to the stage at the Palace Hotel on Monday night to belt out a few AC/DC covers with his band.
Mining veteran Peter Cook has fought almost single-handedly to maintain the more irreverent side of Diggers & Dealers and may have delivered his finest moment on Monday night.
Cook, the executive chairman of Westgold Resources and one of the few people who can claim to have attended every single one of the 29 Diggers & Dealers, was scheduled to take to the stage in the back room at the Palace Hotel on Monday night to belt out a few AC/DC covers with his band, The Smoking Guns.
Also in the band is Castile Resources managing director (and former North Melbourne forward) Mark Hepburn, who was tasked with driving a truck full of instruments up from Perth on Sunday.
Cook is purportedly a more than handy bass player who was on the cusp of becoming a professional musician before he heard the call of mining in his younger days. From all reports he can also do a mean Jimmy Barnes impression.
Like all proper bands, The Smoking Guns have come armed with plenty of merchandise, including tour T-shirts and trucker hats.
Their performance will be the highlight of Canaccord’s cocktail party, one of a host of shindigs scheduled for around Kalgoorlie on Monday night. Both Macquarie and the newly merged Euroz-Hartleys had events lined up in pubs across town. More than a few chief executives are anxious about what Cook has in store for his presentation on Wednesday, given his tendency in previous years to use his time on stage to poke fun at some of the sector’s bigger names.
Cook’s mischievous side is one of the few constants at a conference that has changed noticeably as a result of the pandemic.
A thermal camera at the entry and the hand sanitiser attached to the conference satchels were the most tangible reminders of the pandemic, while attendee numbers are healthy but still well down on previous years due to WA’s ongoing border restrictions.
But with WA now having gone more than six months without a community transmission case of the Melbourne Flu, there’s been at best token observance of social distancing guidelines — especially in Kalgoorlie’s pubs.
The months-long delay for this year’s conference means the weather is far hotter than normal — a welcome change from the freezing desert nights of August.
One of the biggest changes this year, however, has been the lifting of the long ban on politicians.
WA Premier Mark McGowan’s appearance as the keynote speaker was a marked change from previous years, when organisers have forked out sizeable sums to bring in high-profile presenters from around the world. While the return of pollies to Diggers rankled some, particularly those who are growing increasingly frustrated by McGowan’s ongoing closure of the WA border, he received a generally warm welcome.
“All I needed to do to get an invite to this event was lock everyone else out,” McGowan quipped.
He was also the guest of honour at the Northern Star Resources-Saracen Mineral Holdings function overlooking their Super Pit mine on Sunday night.
As McGowan posed for selfies with Northern Star’s Bill Beament and Saracen’s Raleigh Finlayson, the trio may have carefully forgotten their bitter fight just a few years ago over McGowan’s attempt to hike gold royalties. That push was torpedoed in no small part through an industry campaign driven heavily by Northern Star.
It was, however, all smiles from McGowan as he pressed the flesh in Kalgoorlie, which is one of the Liberal-held seats he hopes to pick up from the already diminished opposition.
Kalgoorlie had been a safe Labor seat for a century before Matt Birney won it for the Liberals back in 2001, and current member Kyran O’Donnell would need a big swing against him to lose it at the March election.
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