I was in Southern Cross, which was the location of my birth into the mining industry, for some time before I discovered Kal. I arrived in SX in about early Nov 1994 (following my 1993 work experience posting), and stayed until about Q3 95. Sometime in Q2, SOG's took over RYGOL, who I had been working for. I was made redundant, and effectively asked to reapply for my job. The new bosses frankly came across fairly poorly to me, so I was not sure what to do. One weekend I decided to shoot up to Kal for a look (2 hours away) and by chance went to the Superpit lookout. Compared to what I was used to at Marvel Loch or Mercury, THIS was real mining. OMG. I left convinced that I needed to work in this pit. To put it in context you could have taken all mining in SX by all companies, multiplied it by 100 and thrown it in the Superpit and it still wouldn't have even filled it by 10%. Hey don't get me wrong - satellite and small-pit mining is the corner-stone of where all this came from. But from a young 20-something mining engineer's perspective, Kalgoorlie was IT mofo.
So I went back to SX and wrote to KCGM. They wrote back and said come for an interview. It turns out I had applied just before they advertised, and the boss at the time - George Hewitt - was impressed by that. As it happens, I got the job. So it was farewell SX, and hello Kalgoorlie. For the next five years! Three of which were at the Superpit itself - Fimiston to employees and old-timers, and Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mines officially.
This photo is of a fellow by the name of Bruce McFadzean, or McFads as we called him. He was my first mentor, and frankly, probably the most influential of my mentors throughout my career. I picked this photo out as if you look at other posts regarding Kalgoorlie life, you'll see the more social ones there. This is an industry one. Bruce is a fucking legend. Be more like Bruce.
So I got the job. Day #1 and I turned up to the office near the security gate. There were maybe 10 of us, to do our week-long induction (the length of which I never encountered anywhere else in my career. Now as a seasoned veteran, this would be a tough grind, back then as a greenhorn, it was great). A few of us smoked, and on one such break I spoke to one of the other inductees. He introduced himself as Bruce, and as a fellow mining engineer, nothing else. He had a magnetic personality about him, and was clearly a good 20 years older than me. So of course I gravitated towards him. He told stories about working in Indonesia, about gold mining, about why this place was special, and about what his job was going to be in Strategic Planning. We became friends that week, and it was only after I had started in the mining office and went to look for him one day that I realised he was the Manager of Strategic Planning. That told me a lot about him that he wasn't interested in promoting his level, just our commonality both as engineers. As I said earlier, be more like Bruce. I certainly aspired to be in the first 10 years of my career, and frankly to this day I still do.
Ok so this is a generic gold ore photo and frankly not one likely to be seen at KCGM in my day. I think the old timers got a lot of the native (free) gold, such as shown in this photo. The gold at Fimiston was chemically mixed with massive sulphides, and as such needed serious treating to extract. It had to be roasted to burn the sulphides, then arsenic was used in flotation cells to capture the gold and create a floating slurry that could be taken off the top of big CIL tanks and then the gold extracted from there. I remember we had a slogan shown around the site everywhere - 650 / 300 / 0. This meant, target was 650,000 ounces of gold per year produced, at an average cost of US$300/oz, and with zero serious injuries. I think they have maintained the 650-750koz production, not sure about the injuries, but I know costs are now about $1,000/oz or more, not $300!!! But given where the price of gold is these days, that is not a problem. Although it might be in the future...
Gorgeous George: George was the fellow who actually offered me the job at KCGM, so I shouldn't diss him too much. But he was a muddler at best, not great at making decisions, and not very sound technically. The nickname came care of Alex, who was very adept at giving the more eccentric or nonsense members of the team their own moniker. Perhaps I sell him short, but the reality was he wasn't there for that long, and was replaced as Senior Mining Engineer by my partner in the ranks when I joined, John Battista. I still look up George on LinkedIn from time to time and he is still around in various roles in outback W.A.
JB was the other one of the production engineers when I started at KCGM, and taught me the ropes. When it came to Vulcan, blast monitors, recording and reviewing blasts, dealing with Roche and the mining contract, John was a cracker. Consummate professional and a decent guy too, he was someone really good to learn from. Here is a photo of JB, Bruce and I at a function.
Blast monitors - this was something very new to me, and in those days of the mid-90's, it was pretty cutting edge technology. Being so close to Kalgoorlie and blasting almost every day, we were required to monitor our blasts to ensure we didn't make too much noise, nor cause too much vibration. We had license limits for both, and a series of I think eight monitors right along our boundary with the town. They were essentially a concrete plinth, with the vibration monitor set in it, and a pole with the noise monitor. A solar panel and control box were attached too, and once per month, it was part of my job to go and download our data, clean the monitors, and make sure all was fine and dandy. Once in a while they were vandalised, but as they stood in small fenced compounds, they were mostly ok.
Angelo and Greg - I was away from home over in the Goldfields, and once I broke up with Lucy, did feel pretty alone for a while there. I did make some friends at work, and also had a couple of people share with me in my first year, living on Egan St in Kal. But there were two others from RMIT over in the west too, Angelo and Greg. Angelo working for Orica, which he still does to this day, and Greg I cannot remember. Greg even stayed with me for a period. I remember cooking him pork chops basted in a Thai chilli paste and him thinking that was pretty darn good! I was also out with them pubbing one night when I met an English backpacker - Laura Squires - who also stayed with me for a few days.
Russell In The Hut - this is a post I wrote some years ago on KCGM and various aspects of it. I won't repeat all of it here, but it should be read in conjunction with this one to get a full flavour of life in Kalgoorlie for me.
I am flitting around a bit here, but I guess nobody knows the real sequence of events except me, so it doesn't really matter. In my first year, one of the roles I took on was as a trainee Void Technical Officer. This was a crucial role for safety and productivity. The role was to use the old plans of underground workings, dating back over 100 years, which the Superpit was mining through. What that means is that at any given time, the ground underneath you could give way into an old shaft, drive or stope, which clearly was a safety problem. So we used a drill mounted on a long-reach excavator boom to reach into suspect areas and "probe" drill. The results were recorded and digitised onto the old plans. We then issued these to our survey crews, with "black and white" tape for areas ok for heavy equipment but not people, and "red and white" tape for areas safe for no-one. An example of what can happen is shown below. A drill pattern has partially collapsed and a machine is lying at the bottom of the now open void. The safety implications are obvious.
I actually have a scary story about this kind of thing. The pits were run by contractors (Roche Bros), but KCGM had its own foremen, who were generally in charge of safety and grade control. Quite early on in the piece I became a relief foreman, taking shifts when one of the four main guys was on leave. So one of the jobs foremen had was to check shots after they had been fired - always the next day in order to give the ground time to settle. What we had to do was look for misfires, and check for open voids. In the case of red and white areas, we had to hammer in pegs and put up tape well outside them. Survey could then come safely onto the shot to mark up those boundaries more accurately.
So that takes me more onto what I alluded to in the story above: Relief Foreman. I took to that role like a duck to water and seemed to spend half my time doing it, especially night-shift. And I LOVED night-shift! It was just great to drive around, without all the chatter on the 2-way, keeping an eye on production and safety, filling out my log, and just enjoying being at work. Ok it wasn't really engineering experience, but oh boy was it good experience. Seeing how a pit operates at night is a unique experience, and being in a supervisory role is a real privilege. Peter McAllister, Tony Nobes, Gary Hankinson, and Paul Cullen were the four KCGM foremen, and I think they all enjoyed the chance to take more leave than perhaps they normally could in the year or so that I was able to provide relief foreman services.
The boss was Bob Crewe in those days, old school, and pretty old himself by that time. So I didn't have much at all to do with him. Allan King was in charge of mining, so we saw him a bit and he was ok. Sleep, Gupta, Skinny, Sid Hall, Bob Fussell, Bob Bowie, all were people I worked with. Skinny is still a friend to this day and I caught up with him once in a while over the years (and still on Facebook). Dear old Sid was a lovely man, always keeping the drinks machine full of Diet Coke for me. Alas he passed on some years ago. The rest I don't know. Skinny tells me Bowie is still in Kal, retired now of course.
Birdy. Birdy was an arsehole. He was also the safety officer. Ask anyone in the mining industry (probably any industry) and they'll tell you that when the two things combine, they make for a painful person to deal with. I did have a beer with Birdy once in a while, but only when I was out with Alex and Skinny - I certainly never sought him out. He was cantankerous, and loved getting people into trouble. I'll give you an example. One day I was approaching an intersection. There was a truck coming behind me, which I did not want to delay. The problem was that after the right turn was a tramming drill rig, which was moving slowly. If I waited for it to clear the intersection enough, trucks behind me would have to stop, which I wanted to avoid. So instead, I still turned right, but on the wrong side of the road. No risk, as I had 200m view in all directions. I thought I had made the right call and so did many others. But Birdy saw me, stormed into the boss's office, and demanded I lose my pit license for a month. The boss didn't have a whole lot of choice, but he was sorry he had to. Birdy, on the other hand, was triumphant.
There is so much more I could write about! Dave Lowe, Ed, Hanbury St - that house and that year of being together is a story in itself, and I have already started another post on it. Liesl was another co-worker I stayed with, together with Trish and Jayson. Not for long though. I did enjoy it and liked them all, but never did well in shared houses with a lot of people. During my three years at KCGM I had constant struggles with weight, took up smoking, quit smoking, drank far too much, and did what most early 20's people did I guess - lived life to the full. When Bruce left in 1998 I kind of lost my rudder though, and as mentioned earlier, I wasn't all that settled in the mine planning section. I still needed a mentor, so in the end, I followed him to Tarmoola, which is where Part 3 takes place.
Righto, there were go. We have dealt with my career from it's early beginnings in late 1993 to moving on from KCGM in mid-1998. Only five years out of more than 28 so far, and two very in-depth posts. It'll be interesting to see if I have such detailed memories and things to say going forward. For some parts, no doubt I will, for others, well see let's see shall we...
Angelo and Greg - I was away from home over in the Goldfields, and once I broke up with Lucy, did feel pretty alone for a while there. I did make some friends at work, and also had a couple of people share with me in my first year, living on Egan St in Kal. But there were two others from RMIT over in the west too, Angelo and Greg. Angelo working for Orica, which he still does to this day, and Greg I cannot remember. Greg even stayed with me for a period. I remember cooking him pork chops basted in a Thai chilli paste and him thinking that was pretty darn good! I was also out with them pubbing one night when I met an English backpacker - Laura Squires - who also stayed with me for a few days.
Russell In The Hut - this is a post I wrote some years ago on KCGM and various aspects of it. I won't repeat all of it here, but it should be read in conjunction with this one to get a full flavour of life in Kalgoorlie for me.
Let's reflect on who from KCGM I am still in touch with, all these years later; Skinny probably more than anyone else. Coops, McFads, Innes, Hanky Panky, Batman, Alex once in a blue moon. The only people I have actually seen since then are Richo of course, as I have worked with him many times since. But on a friendly level, it's Martin and Cobby. Martin I last saw in Singapore, and Cobby in KL. Neither there to visit me, but we were in touch, so caught up nonetheless. I have seen Martin a number of times over the years, Cobby just the once. I actually thought of Martin the other day, because he liked a post on LinkedIn that was in remembrance of fire fighters on 9/11. On that fateful day he actually visited me in my little flat in Perth and we sat there and watched the events unfold together. I remember having the flu. Funny how some things stick with you.
Kal was a very social place and we were often out for company drinks, dinners and the like. I remember Jeff (the mine manager when I joined) introducing me at one such evening to someone and telling them I had an outstanding work ethic. Haha, well I didn't have a whole lot else to do and used to always come in on a Saturday morning to catch up on things. Plus I was just in love with driving around the pit, being with the legendary guys we had there, and absorbing everything I could.
So once Batman was promoted to Senior and George left, things changed a bit. Alex came into our team and I actually had to teach him how to do blast design. An example of a blast design is below. It is a logical pattern of blast holes, which are then loaded with explosives and "tied in", which means linking together so they blast in sequence and make nicely broken rock to dig. An example of a tie-in is below, as well as an actual photo I took of a drill pattern there.
I also got into what we called blastmaster design, and pit design. A good example of a pit, and one similar in scale to Fimiston is below. That picture is an overall pit. Now it is important to understand that one does not mine the whole thing out bench by bench. Instead, you would pick one part and drive down on that, to get to the ore quickly. Once you reached the ore and had a steady supply, you could then start on another part of the pit, called a cutback. KCGM had a number of cutbacks going at any one time. Scheduling this, both the cutback strategy as well as the blastmaster extraction sequence, was a pretty big deal. The thing with open cut mining is you want it to be as steady state as possible - that is, consistent production and grade, leading to consistent gold output. To not do that would result in wildly varying costs, and a loss of market confidence. So we put a lot of effort into making sure we got this right. It was great to be part of a very capable and experienced team in learning these skills. Dean and Colvin were the two planning engineers when I was there, and they both taught me a lot. When Peter McArdle was the Superintendent of the department, it was inclusive, proactive and fun. A later boss and I clashed - actually two of them. One was capable but just had a poor approach to management, and one was just a bit of an air-head. I look back at my performance under the later two with a little bit of shame, as I could have done a lot better in that period of time. I was unhappy under the latter two, so I ended up just gravitating back to where I always did - the pit.
I actually have a scary story about this kind of thing. The pits were run by contractors (Roche Bros), but KCGM had its own foremen, who were generally in charge of safety and grade control. Quite early on in the piece I became a relief foreman, taking shifts when one of the four main guys was on leave. So one of the jobs foremen had was to check shots after they had been fired - always the next day in order to give the ground time to settle. What we had to do was look for misfires, and check for open voids. In the case of red and white areas, we had to hammer in pegs and put up tape well outside them. Survey could then come safely onto the shot to mark up those boundaries more accurately.
So one morning, Hanky Panky (Gary Hankinson) and I were doing a shot check. It had a shaft in the middle, so we took a wide berth and starting hammering in pegs. We were talking as we did it - he on one side, me on the other. I put my next peg on the broken ground, and hit it with my mallet. To my shock, the peg simply disappeared. I looked up, wide-eyed, to Gary, and in that moment, the ground around me collapsed, as whatever it was hanging up in the old shaft gave way. Immediately I was on my back, sliding down this slope of moving rock, as it all slid into the shaft. Holy shit! I turned around and on all fours, scrabbled my way up the scree slope and onto non-moving ground on the rest of the shot. That was a bit of a close call. After the one in Southern Cross underground, it was probably the second-most dangerous incident of my career.
So that takes me more onto what I alluded to in the story above: Relief Foreman. I took to that role like a duck to water and seemed to spend half my time doing it, especially night-shift. And I LOVED night-shift! It was just great to drive around, without all the chatter on the 2-way, keeping an eye on production and safety, filling out my log, and just enjoying being at work. Ok it wasn't really engineering experience, but oh boy was it good experience. Seeing how a pit operates at night is a unique experience, and being in a supervisory role is a real privilege. Peter McAllister, Tony Nobes, Gary Hankinson, and Paul Cullen were the four KCGM foremen, and I think they all enjoyed the chance to take more leave than perhaps they normally could in the year or so that I was able to provide relief foreman services.
The boss was Bob Crewe in those days, old school, and pretty old himself by that time. So I didn't have much at all to do with him. Allan King was in charge of mining, so we saw him a bit and he was ok. Sleep, Gupta, Skinny, Sid Hall, Bob Fussell, Bob Bowie, all were people I worked with. Skinny is still a friend to this day and I caught up with him once in a while over the years (and still on Facebook). Dear old Sid was a lovely man, always keeping the drinks machine full of Diet Coke for me. Alas he passed on some years ago. The rest I don't know. Skinny tells me Bowie is still in Kal, retired now of course.
Birdy. Birdy was an arsehole. He was also the safety officer. Ask anyone in the mining industry (probably any industry) and they'll tell you that when the two things combine, they make for a painful person to deal with. I did have a beer with Birdy once in a while, but only when I was out with Alex and Skinny - I certainly never sought him out. He was cantankerous, and loved getting people into trouble. I'll give you an example. One day I was approaching an intersection. There was a truck coming behind me, which I did not want to delay. The problem was that after the right turn was a tramming drill rig, which was moving slowly. If I waited for it to clear the intersection enough, trucks behind me would have to stop, which I wanted to avoid. So instead, I still turned right, but on the wrong side of the road. No risk, as I had 200m view in all directions. I thought I had made the right call and so did many others. But Birdy saw me, stormed into the boss's office, and demanded I lose my pit license for a month. The boss didn't have a whole lot of choice, but he was sorry he had to. Birdy, on the other hand, was triumphant.
But Birdy was the exception to the rule, in terms of camaraderie, mateship and great people at KCGM. Most were bloody awesome, and I have no doubt that my career has been as good as it has because of my foundation in good people. Two of the better ones are in the photo below. Alex and Coops. Alex was a good coworker, a good mentor, and a good friend. We enjoyed a beer and a punt from time to time, as well as sharing and cooking curries for each other. He was a good influence on me. Coops was and is a great mate too. We actually travelled to Vietnam together in 1997, which is something I need to write about sometime, because when I see footage of Vietnam now, OMFG it is SO different!
Friday beers were often had at the Piccadilly Hotel, and one other I cannot remember. We also all played golf a lot, although I soon gave it up after KCGM, as I didn't like the person I became when playing it most of the time to be honest.
There is so much more I could write about! Dave Lowe, Ed, Hanbury St - that house and that year of being together is a story in itself, and I have already started another post on it. Liesl was another co-worker I stayed with, together with Trish and Jayson. Not for long though. I did enjoy it and liked them all, but never did well in shared houses with a lot of people. During my three years at KCGM I had constant struggles with weight, took up smoking, quit smoking, drank far too much, and did what most early 20's people did I guess - lived life to the full. When Bruce left in 1998 I kind of lost my rudder though, and as mentioned earlier, I wasn't all that settled in the mine planning section. I still needed a mentor, so in the end, I followed him to Tarmoola, which is where Part 3 takes place.
Righto, there were go. We have dealt with my career from it's early beginnings in late 1993 to moving on from KCGM in mid-1998. Only five years out of more than 28 so far, and two very in-depth posts. It'll be interesting to see if I have such detailed memories and things to say going forward. For some parts, no doubt I will, for others, well see let's see shall we...
