White Gold

Aluminium's lightness and flexibiliby have helped to revolutionise packaging, aviation and many other industries, and its impact on daily life is evident everywhere. Alcoa of Australia is in the forefront of both the mining and processing of what is perhaps the most significant metal of the twentieth century.Alcoa of Australia was the offspring of an at first hesitant union between an Australian mining group headed by Western Mining and the Pittsburgh-based Aluminum Company of America. The natural resource that gave rise to this development---the extensive reserves of bauxite in the Darling Range near Perth---had been known about for decades but was shunned as worthless. In this far-reaching history Geoffrey Blainey details with insight and clarity the story of Alcoa, from the visionary work of the mining entrepreneur Lindesay Calrk, the first chairman of Alcoa of Australia, to the emergence in the 1990s of a global alliance, Alcoa World Alumina, the world's largest alumina producer.Alcoa of Australia has been crucial in the industrial development of Western Australia since the 1960s and its story reflects much of the history of corporate Australia. Some of the legendary figures of Australian industry are prominent in this story, as are many of the most important and contentious environmental, industrial and political issues of recent decades.Blainey, Geoffrey is the author of 'White Gold', published 1997 under ISBN 9781864483550 and ISBN 1864483555.