She put on her headphones and selected the news channel.
She’d had barely enough time to get back to her flat and pack and make it to Sydney Airport in time, but flying to Perth tonight and connecting to the overnight SAA flight to Johannesburg would give her an extra working day in South Africa and a chance to get a handle on the situation with Loubser before the rest of her itinerary kicked in.
She had plenty of work to do on the flight. On her lap was a folder of printouts of press clippings, extracts from reports, and the executive summary of the environmental impact statement for the proposed new coalmine near the Kruger National Park.
Even though Global Resources had several interests in Africa, this was her first visit to the continent. It was also her first business trip in her new role. She wanted to hit the ground running.
She had received the standard email from the company’s head of security about risks and dangers in Africa. Johannesburg seemed to have a justifiably bad reputation for violent crime and a couple of the South Africans in the office had put the frighteners on herby recounting tales of home invasions, carjackings, shootings and murders of friends of friends. Kylie wasn’t scared by the stories, but nor was she particularly looking forward to this trip.
As well as getting to meet the people in the South African office who would now be reporting to her, she was going to get a full briefing on Global Resources’ operations and a visit to the site of the proposed new coalmine. The Eureka mine in the historic gold-mining town of Barberton in Mpumalanga Province would have been a one-day stopover, but Jan had told her to spend as much time there as she felt necessary, particularly if the situation with the missing environmental manager wasn’t resolved before she arrived. Jan wanted the men and women at the mine to know head office was concerned about their losses and the missing man.
Kylie had dealt with death in the past. When she was managing the coalmine in the Hunter Valley, two miners had been crushed to death when the hanging wall had collapsed. She’d had to front the local media to give a statement and deal with the workplace safety investigators and police. Most difficult of all, she’d had to contact the wives of the two men who’d been killed. Kylie had gone home that night and cried her eyes out and polished off a bottle of wine, but the next day she’d visited the widows in person and later helped organise a fundraising dinner with the mine employees and the local community to ensure there was enough money for the children of both families to get the education their mothers expected.
Mining was dangerous. Every man and woman who went underground knew that, and Kylie thought it wasn’t a bad thing if every man and woman in head office at least once in their life had to look into the crying eyes of a grieving spouse or parent or child of a dead miner. It made the risks real and meant decisions were taken less lightly.
Kylie flicked through her folder to the latest figures on workplace accidents, injuries and fatalities in South Africa. She’d seen the figures before, but still exhaled through her teeth when she read them again. Numbers like this would be front page news in the
West Australian
or the
Sydney Morning Herald
, but the explanatory paragraph beneaththe figures in the report pointed out that Global Resources had the lowest number and ratio of workplace fatalities per days worked of any mining company in South Africa. She wondered if the two deaths at Barberton two nights earlier would change that.
Whatever. It wasn’t good enough being the best of a bad bunch. Kylie had her sights set on the top job and she wanted Global Resources to be a company where no one had to make the call to tell someone a loved one would not be coming home.
Kylie flipped back to the itinerary her personal assistant, Sandy Hyland, had prepared for her. She circled a couple of things. The
She’d had barely enough time to get back to her flat and pack and make it to Sydney Airport in time, but flying to Perth tonight and connecting to the overnight SAA flight to Johannesburg would give her an extra working day in South Africa and a chance to get a handle on the situation with Loubser before the rest of her itinerary kicked in.
She had plenty of work to do on the flight. On her lap was a folder of printouts of press clippings, extracts from reports, and the executive summary of the environmental impact statement for the proposed new coalmine near the Kruger National Park.
Even though Global Resources had several interests in Africa, this was her first visit to the continent. It was also her first business trip in her new role. She wanted to hit the ground running.
She had received the standard email from the company’s head of security about risks and dangers in Africa. Johannesburg seemed to have a justifiably bad reputation for violent crime and a couple of the South Africans in the office had put the frighteners on herby recounting tales of home invasions, carjackings, shootings and murders of friends of friends. Kylie wasn’t scared by the stories, but nor was she particularly looking forward to this trip.
As well as getting to meet the people in the South African office who would now be reporting to her, she was going to get a full briefing on Global Resources’ operations and a visit to the site of the proposed new coalmine. The Eureka mine in the historic gold-mining town of Barberton in Mpumalanga Province would have been a one-day stopover, but Jan had told her to spend as much time there as she felt necessary, particularly if the situation with the missing environmental manager wasn’t resolved before she arrived. Jan wanted the men and women at the mine to know head office was concerned about their losses and the missing man.
Kylie had dealt with death in the past. When she was managing the coalmine in the Hunter Valley, two miners had been crushed to death when the hanging wall had collapsed. She’d had to front the local media to give a statement and deal with the workplace safety investigators and police. Most difficult of all, she’d had to contact the wives of the two men who’d been killed. Kylie had gone home that night and cried her eyes out and polished off a bottle of wine, but the next day she’d visited the widows in person and later helped organise a fundraising dinner with the mine employees and the local community to ensure there was enough money for the children of both families to get the education their mothers expected.
Mining was dangerous. Every man and woman who went underground knew that, and Kylie thought it wasn’t a bad thing if every man and woman in head office at least once in their life had to look into the crying eyes of a grieving spouse or parent or child of a dead miner. It made the risks real and meant decisions were taken less lightly.
Kylie flicked through her folder to the latest figures on workplace accidents, injuries and fatalities in South Africa. She’d seen the figures before, but still exhaled through her teeth when she read them again. Numbers like this would be front page news in the
West Australian
or the
Sydney Morning Herald
, but the explanatory paragraph beneaththe figures in the report pointed out that Global Resources had the lowest number and ratio of workplace fatalities per days worked of any mining company in South Africa. She wondered if the two deaths at Barberton two nights earlier would change that.
Whatever. It wasn’t good enough being the best of a bad bunch. Kylie had her sights set on the top job and she wanted Global Resources to be a company where no one had to make the call to tell someone a loved one would not be coming home.
Kylie flipped back to the itinerary her personal assistant, Sandy Hyland, had prepared for her. She circled a couple of things. The
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