Marriner Eccles and Queensland Premier J. C. A. Pizzey opened the Blackwater Mine on May 1 I, 1968. Bud Wilson, UC&M's vice president is at rear left. BLACKWATER Since 1950 the company had been active in Australia, at first constructing dams and other projects. As mining became the company's chief interest, it established an exploration office for iron ore and coking coal. In the Blackwater area of the State of Queensland, company geologists "found the most important discovery of metallurgical coal, certainly in this century, and maybe ever," Littlefield related. "The coking coal was of a good quality. We had seams as thick as 30 feet with not too much overburden on them." In 1968 Eccles (then 77 years of age) and Wilson joined Queensland Premier J.C.A. Pizzey in opening the Blackwater Mine. Before long the company opened mines at a number of sites, including Goldsworthy, Goonyella, Peak Downs, and Saraji. The friendly relations displayed as government officials joined company executives at mine openings and social gatherings belied discontent as Australia's natural resources brought a foreign company such extraordinary success. When the Labour Party came to power in December 1972, it issued demands that seemed impossible to satisfy, and UI's mining operations were repeatedly hit by strikes. While the governmental structure in Australia differed significantly from the dictatorship in Peru, the 1975 expropriation of the Marcona Mine shadowed the tense dynamics and diplomacy taking place on the opposite side of the globe.