by Jim Richards
‘No problem, we’ll just move the material out of the way for you,’ he said.
The four traditional owners picked up the artefacts they deemed important enough and respectfully moved them a few metres away from the area to be drilled. I was impressed by this practical outcome and we continued on with our survey.
Each night, Ian regaled us with stories of his childhood in the Pilbara, in a time before the iron ore mines had become the main force in the area. As a young man he’d worked as a stockman on Minderoo Station, and remembered Andrew Forrest as a child there running around in his nappies. From these humble beginnings, Andrew had gone on to become one of the world’s great iron ore mining magnates, philanthropist and at one point the richest man in Australia.
At the end of the survey, I was relieved when Ian and his team confirmed there were no sacred sites on our area and signed off on all of the clearances we required to do our drilling.
I have done a number of these clearance surveys over the years and have consistently found the Aboriginal people involved to be genuine and helpful. However, I have not always found it so easy to negotiate with some of the non-Aboriginal lawyers who work for the Land Councils – the legal entities representing indigenous groups.
Aboriginal people were the big losers during the European colonisation of Australia. Many were murdered and, driven by government policy, many more were forcibly removed from the places they belonged, thus shattering their connection to their country and delivering them into lives of dislocation. It has only been in the last couple of centuries that their ancient links with the land have been broken.
It was easy to criticise the gold rush villains far away in Brazil for doing the wrong thing, yet here in Australia – in the not too distant past – shameful deeds were also done. It was not until the 1990s, at a time of shifting national awareness and cultural consciousness, that determined leadership by mining company Rio Tinto created a process of partnering with Aboriginal people that helped establish today’s more enlightened standard.
These days mining companies aim to provide local jobs, engage with stakeholders, listen to the needs of traditional land custodians, deliver positive environmental outcomes, and so on. In return, the company receives what is known as a ‘social licence to operate’ or, as one mining executive described it to me, ‘Ensuring people don’t throw buckets of shit over you on your way to work.’
So who actually owns the gold or minerals in the first place? In most jurisdictions around the world, the state lawfully owns the mineral rights, which it will farm out in return for taxes and royalty payments (and bribes in some developing nations). In reality, many artisanal miners just keep whatever they find and the big companies pay the taxes.
In the developing world, ownership of minerals can be a matter of opinion. In parts of Africa, tenure may be smoothly transferred from a rich white guy representing a mining company to a rich black guy represented by a bunch of fourteen-year-old kids with AK-47s. In Venezuela, they dispense with the kids and the government just calls it nationalisation.
A month later we commenced our drilling program. After some perseverance, our team found the iron ore mineralisation we were targeting. Under 20 metres of cover, there it was: an extraordinary, virgin, high-grade iron ore discovery, just as Mal Kneeshaw had predicted. I named the find ‘Railway’, as it was conveniently located right next to an iron ore railway haulage line.
In October 2007, a detailed twenty-page announcement I had written, describing the discovery of Railway, was released to the stock market. This find was precisely the kind of achievement I had been striving for since the float of the company nearly three years before.
Ironically, by this point I was ready to move on. I was pleased with the discovery of Railway, but happy to go. I had a lot of shares in the company – indeed, I was the second-largest shareholder – but without a controlling stake I would never have the power to manage the company the way I wanted. Control was (and is) important to me.
There were also some significant personal issues that needed more of my time back in the UK. My father had died the previous year, and my mother was now becoming unwell. I was particularly close to my mother and had missed out on time with her during my working life. I wanted to amend for that in some small way.
I had always been determined to make the company work, both for personal reasons and also because I felt I owed it to the shareholders. After three years at the helm, and having led the team that had recently discovered a most valuable iron ore project, I resigned as CEO and director at the 2007 annual general meeting. I was a free agent once more and, through my large shareholding (which I still held), becoming a wealthy one too, as the share price was rising.
With further drilling and discovery, Railway proved to be a superb iron ore deposit: 100 million tonnes at the high grade of 60 per cent iron and with low impurities. If that amount of iron ore was sold at an average price of $50 per tonne, it would provide a gross revenue of $5 billion.
In February 2010, the company was taken over by the giant mining group BHP Billiton for A$204 million dollars. I was no longer a director of the company, but still a shareholder. Through this takeover, I made over A$12 million from the sale of my stock in the company, the serendipitous payback for all of the risks I had taken in the gold-rush years. This came as something of a shock. I had never had any real money before, just the normal amount of a salaried journeyman. The last time I had made money this quickly was on that pothole day in Guyana; this windfall represented a lot of potholes.
Finally I had succeeded, not just in terms of technical achievement, personal growth or experience; this time I had made it in cold, hard cash, which had been my original intention when I had left for South America all those years before.
My foremost feeling was one of relief.
This bonanza now allows me to do what I love: prospecting and exploring for minerals in the great Australian outback.
These days, the hunt for minerals is more centred on big data, and on searching satellite imagery, geophysics, geochemistry and historical exploration records for clues that could lead to an undiscovered mineral deposit.
Although there is still plenty of field work and checking to be done, technology and computers have radically changed the life of a geologist. The world is a smaller place, the old HF radios we used in Guyana are history, and now we are only a phone call away from anyone, anytime. Gone are the days I remember in Laos of Non Carte, unmapped areas of the globe in which to explore virgin territory, and gone with them is some of the risk, the self-reliance, and the romance.
Environmental constraints are now, rightly, a big part of the mining business, and government red tape is ever growing.
I work out of an office in West Perth, running a resource company, trying to discover the next big mineral deposit. All around are other mineral exploration companies, in what must be the most concentrated square kilometre of geologists in the world.
Every now and again, a young British geology graduate wanders into my office and asks me for a job, and I am transported back to that day in Guyana when I myself was looking for a job and solved my four problems at once.
It is hardly surprising that people are beating a path to Perth, with its friendly people, good weather, beautiful beaches, terrific fishing and access to some of the greatest repositories of mineral wealth on the planet.
And that is where the thrill of a potential mineral discovery comes from: the chance to stumble over some monster deposit worth billions of dollars and to have your company’s share price soar.
That is what keeps us in the game.
The other day I visited a modern iron ore mine here in Western Australia.
It looked just like a mine should look: big machines moving big dirt. The dump trucks crawled like ants in a line out of the vast open pit. But these trucks had no drivers. Computerised robots were operating the machines, tracked by GPS and coordinated from a control centre at Perth Airport 1,000 kilometr
es away.
Where was Ronny Root-Rat, the dump truck driver from our old gold mine in Meekatharra, telling his tall tales in the wet mess? There was no Ronny Root-Rat. Pretty soon there wouldn’t even be a wet mess.
The magic was gone. The romance had not just been the mines or the money or the gold. It had been the people.
I am glad that I lived when I lived, and worked when I worked, and did what I did.
I have read many accounts of gold rushes from the nineteenth century and feel an eerie connection to those old-timers. Their motivations and fears back then were the same as mine a century later. So what was my gold rush?
It was a state of mind. Heading off alone, trying to make my fortune in a place far from my own comfort zone. A challenge with a purpose. For me, it literally was a gold rush. For someone else it could be heading off to Silicon Valley or some big city. Backing yourself to take risks and succeed.
I did a lot of things right. I turned up, took risks, persevered and learned enough to eventually succeed – but talk about doing it the hard way! For all the challenges and tribulations, my quest to get rich by finding gold was an early failure. I was youthful and thought I had an excuse. Yet great industrialists like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, the richest men in the world during the early twentieth century, put the pieces together correctly while young, and prospered. Why couldn’t I?
If I had been less fixated on the gold itself and more focused on actually building something meaningful, I probably would have done a lot better financially, a lot earlier.
I was too quick to pick up a shovel and start digging (literally). A better strategy would have been to build relationships and structures around which I could advance various mining ideas, leveraging between different countries – promoting Guyanese mining projects to financiers in Canada, for instance – while delegating the risk to other people, rich people.
Guyana in particular was an opportunity wasted. Instinctively, at the time, I knew there was a chance being squandered. I just could not work out how to profit from that opening. So I left Guyana feeling I had missed out somehow, that a piece of myself was left back there.
Ten years later, at another diamond conference in Perth, I ran into a geologist called Damon Edwards. He had worked at Golden Star in Guyana just after I had left the company and we knew many of the same people. We joked about having put up with many of the same illnesses and hazards, although Damon outdid me as he had been given a shock by an electric eel while washing his plate in a river.
So we enjoyed catching up to relive the old times. I met Damon’s wife, Hermena, a friendly Guyanese woman, and it was delicious to hear that lovely accent again. Through Hermena, I met her strikingly beautiful and smart sister Herma, who had come to Perth to study.
A couple of months later Herma and I were married.
My current life is the other side of the gold-rush dream: a selfless and loving wife, our home full of happy children and the wonderful city of Perth in which to live.
I just knew that I had some unfinished business from Guyana.
For my four sons, David, Ethan, Jamie and Huw.
Lest they repeat the sins of their father.
EPILOGUE
Did I own the gold or did the gold own me?
Initially the gold owned me, no doubt. But failure is a wonderful teacher, and over time I learned to master how I felt about my pursuit of gold and the people and the world around me. Self-control had replaced the gold fever, and as a result a more successful person had replaced the optimistic prospector. The battle had not been against the jungles, the isolation or the geology; it had been with myself.
Now I own the gold, and I’m finding a lot more of it.
As the boom and bust of different mineral pricing cycles rolls ever on, different commodities become the target of prospectors and exploration companies: a periodic table of speculation.
New technologies also drive prices in certain minerals, making them desirable targets for explorers. Lithium for batteries, or the new wonder material graphene, for instance. Graphene consists of sheets of graphite (carbon) just a few atoms thick. In certain circumstances it can be extracted from graphite, elemental carbon that occurs naturally. Graphene can be used in conductive inks, flexible display screens, 3D printing, composite materials (for added strength), energy storage and paints. Finding deposits that can produce cheap graphene is the new gold rush. Not quite as exciting as finding gold or diamonds in rivers, perhaps, but currently a lot more lucrative.
The urge to discover burns brightly in humankind, and especially so in the pursuit of minerals. From the prospector up to some of the largest companies in the world, out there somewhere right now is an army of people, looking.
Depending on how they are developed, these discoveries can enhance or destroy local communities. But if it isn’t grown, it’s mined; take a look around right now and have a think about it. Critics of the industry can tap away on their computers (made from plastics, aluminium, iron, zinc, lead, cadmium, arsenic, gold, silver, cerium, and so on), writing critical articles about mining but, in the end, people use the stuff.
The mining industry can be the problem or the answer, depending upon the operation. The transition from the rapacious days of the early gold rushes to today’s more enlightened times continues, but there is still much to be done.
At its worst, mining can fuel civil war and misery. In Africa the coltan (tantalite for mobile phones) conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the diamond wars in Sierra Leone and Angola in the 1990s and 2000s left millions of people displaced and unknown numbers dead or mutilated. Other conflicts continue today.
At its best, mining now offers a pathway for indigenous communities to realise employment and development on their own lands and on their own terms. The environment can benefit from managed reserves, well-funded conservation programs and appropriate rehabilitation. Whole countries can prosper from the taxes paid and opportunities provided.
Chucking shit at mining companies is easy. The challenge is to harness mining as the potent force for good it can be: to empower, educate and lift from poverty some of the most disadvantaged people on earth and, in the process, to leave the environment as good as, or better than, when we started. Products mined in this way are the ones worth buying.
Everyone can do their bit. As a consumer, check out the ethical sourcing policy of your product manufacturer. Does it have a policy? Does it track the supply chain of its raw materials? If not, why not? Ask. Many positive historic changes in mining started with ordinary people taking a stand: the banning of hydraulic mining in California in 1884, for instance. The good guys inside the mining industry also need good guys outside the mining industry.
When I was a boy, I loved to dream. And now that I am a man, I reflect upon the dreams of that boy and hope that I have done them justice.
I think I have.
APPENDIX A
GOLD PROPERTIES
Symbol
Au
Atomic number
79
Atomic mass
197
Isotopes
197 Au one stable isotope
Density
19.3 g/cm3
Melting point
1,064°C
Activity
Chemically inactive
Colour
Yellow
Physical properties
The most malleable and ductile of metals
Hardness
2.5–3.0 Mohs’ scale
Name origin
Gold is the Anglo-Saxon name. The chemical symbol for gold, Au, is derived from the Latin ‘aurum.’
Gold (and other precious metals) has traditionally been measured in grains, pennyweights, troy ounces and troy pounds.
24 grains
one pennyweight (abbrev. dwt) – literally the weight of a British silver penny
20 pennyweights
one troy ounce
12 troy ounces
&nb
sp; one troy pound
16 avoirdupois (imperial) ounces
one imperial pound
1 troy ounce
1.0971 avoirdupois ounces
More recently gold has been measured in grams, kilograms and tonnes, which are metric units.
1,000 grams
1 kilogram
1,000 kilograms
1 tonne
Conversions
1 troy ounce
31.1035 grams
1 troy pound
373.2417 grams
1 imperial pound
453.5924 grams
1 kilogram
32.15 troy ounces
1 million troy ounces
31,103.5 kilograms
APPENDIX B
A BRIEF HISTORY OF GOLD
4,000 BC
Gold is mined and worked by the Sumerians in what is now Iran.
3,600 BC
Egyptians mining and using gold.
3,000 BC
First gold coins minted by Egyptians.
2,000 BC
Gold alloys produced in Egypt.
961 BC
King Solomon has mines in what is now Saudi Arabia.
AD 79
Eruption of Vesuvius. Evidence of widespread use of gold coinage by the Romans.
AD 1000
Global production around 75,000 ounces per year.
1284
Ducat gold coin introduced in Venice.
1323
First documented gold rush at Garam in Hungary.
