Tim Griffin: The challenges of explaining how mining works and why it is so important

Tim Griffin reflects on some of his experiences as Director of GSWA.

Transcript

00:00 Tim

Part of the open pit development in Kalgoorlie was right against the townsite. They said, ‘We're gonna have to move the water tank if we want to get access to this extra ore’. The city manager said, “Oh, why don't they move the mine?” 

00:18 Julie

Welcome to The Rocks Beneath Our Feet. In this series, five geologists talk about their years devoted to working for the Geological Survey of Western Australia. From understanding early life, to the tectonic processes that shaped our planet, and making the maps that unearth our understanding of Western Australia’s geology, they reveal their shared passion for discovering the stories in the rocks beneath our feet.

I’m Julie Hollis.

In this episode, Tim Griffin reflects on some of his experiences as Director of GSWA.

01:06 Tim

I became Deputy Director in the geological survey and then director of the geological survey, a position I held for 10 years, before moving on to a position of Deputy Director General in the Mines Department. Then towards the end of that time, I spent a reasonable amount as Acting Director General.

01:24 Julie

One of the most important changes in GSWA’s data delivery policies was the commitment to public delivery of data, free of charge. Tim talks here about how that came about.

01:35 Tim

One of the most brilliant ideas that came in with, whoever did it under the Mining Act in Western Australia said that you've got an exploration license, you've committed to spend a certain amount of money over a certain amount of time, but you must report the data back to the geological survey, justify the expenditure by providing the data. And whoever had that was the smartest person because, it's a community resource that they're given a license to develop, so they should give it back to the community. And that information has become invaluable,

02:27 Julie

Yep.

02:27 Tim

in terms of, you know, sort of that combined volume of geoscience information that's available for people to use these days. And you know, and it represents billions of dollars worth of investment by the exploration sector. It's massive.

02:42 Julie

Yeah.

02:43 Tim

I guess going back to some fundamentals, we struggled with, in the early days, with data and what you should do with it, and particularly as we could package it up in digital formats, even if it was just scanned maps and things initially. And it was a view that we should be charging industry and raising money to support the surveys and what they were doing, and it was all around the world. And so we used to meet up with the Canadians at PDAC on a regular basis and exchange notes on how they were going. Fundamentally, we felt that it was data collected with public money, it should be in the public domain.

03:23 Julie

Yeah.

03:24 Tim

If we sold it at a price that would generate sufficient revenue for surveys to run, you count a lot of people out of that data. And a lot of, you know, particularly in Australia, the small guys have played a critical role, and we want them to get access to it.

03:39 Julie

Yeah.

03:40 Tim

A lot of them are more agile, and they employ some of the, you know, the new smart graduates that haven't got a job with a company, a bigger company, and, and they can provide incredible insight. So we were keen to do this, but there was a lot of pressure, particularly coming out of the Commonwealth, to charge for it.

03:59 Julie

Right.

03:59 Tim

And I remember Dennis Gee was running the geological survey in the Northern Territory at the time, and he’d put a couple of CDs together with their data on it. And he said, “Oh blow it, do your damnedest, I'm going to give it away for free”. And as soon as he did that, we said, “Yeah, ours is free as well”. And of course, Commonwealth, Geoscience Australia said, “Oh well, that’s it then. It’s going to be free”. 

And that gets me on to, I suppose, the core libraries, which are another fantastic resource.

04:25 Julie

I was just going to mention that.

04:27 Tim

And so that other requirement is that if the government wants the core, you know, you have to provide it. Now, the rules are pretty good to industry, we're not going to interfere with your potential to sample the core, to do your work. But at the end of the day, the government can ask for the core and put it into storage. And, you know, the number of times people have gone back to old cores and got new insights, I suppose, into the reason for the mineralization. It's just dramatic. I suppose we shouldn't be too surprised, because I am always staggered when I think about the Kambalda core yard, and it was massive. It was just this huge, because they'd done so much drilling around Kambalda for the nickel ore, and they'd kept it all. And it was all out in the open stacked up in trays.

05:05 Julie

Yeah.

05:06 Tim

And they would send new geologists down and re-log some old core just to get a different view. The reality is we can't keep all the cores, as a government.

05:15 Julie

Yep.

05:16 Tim

We do try and keep all the petroleum cores. But you know, there's going to be a limit to that. In fact, our core libraries were pretty ratty and material was stashed in sheds all around Perth at one point. And so there was discussion about getting a core library up and running. Well, the story behind that is that industry was saying, ‘Oh, yeah, that'd be a good idea’. And we were sitting in the office and the director of the survey was there and he said, “I just got a call, I’ve got to call back. The industry want to put up a proposal for a new core library in Perth. They want to know how much it's going to cost.” So it was either $8 million or $10 million. Oh, yeah, that's what we need. So he just went back and told them that and it got up and got funded. And so that was the start of the new core libraries where we built the Kalgoorlie core library and the Perth core library.

06:09 Julie

Right.

06:10 Tim

And that was a challenging exercise in itself, because in those core libraries, to maximize the value of the footprint, we've got racks which are 12 shelves high.

06:20 Julie

Yep.

06:20 Tim

Each shelf can hold a ton of rocks. So you're putting a ton of rocks 12 metres in the air. And you don't want your turret truck to fall over when it's got a ton of rocks at 12 metres up in the air.

06:35 Julie

No.

06:35 Tim

And so we had to have super flat floors and we also had a guidance wire in the floor to control the machine. So if it lost contact with that guidance wire it would immediately stop. But shortly after the Perth building was built, and I went in there. And we had this plan to bring the core into the yard, put it through a logging-in process and it went through sort of an induction room and then got put in into the shelving. And it didn't sit around on the ground outside or inside or anything like that. And I came in and there were pallets of this petroleum core lying around inside higgledy piggledy. And I said, “No, this isn't right”. And they said, “Oh Tim, we didn't think it right to put $10 million of core out in the open for fear it would be damaged. I said, “okay”. They said, “We're working on it, we’ll get it away in a week or two.”

Yeah, they’re amazingly valuable resources. And of course, you know, we get the added benefit now we've got these new core scanning pieces of equipment, and so people can get more out of the old core than they did previously.

07:39 Julie

Here, Tim reflects on his interactions with public authorities and the sometimes surprising misunderstandings of how mining works, the challenges of explaining how it does work, and why it’s so important.

07:53 Tim

Part of the open pit development in Kalgoorlie, right up against the townsite, was that, you know, they’d do some drilling, and there was a small pit at the top of the main street of Kalgoorlie. And they did some work and they realized that they could open the pit a little bit further and get another $10 million worth of gold out of it.

08:14 Julie

Yep.

08:15 Tim

But the water tank that pressurized the water supply for the people Kalgoorlie was sitting on the top of this hill. And so they said, Look, we're going to have to move the water tank, if we want to open up this extra get access to this extra ore.

08:29 Julie

Yep.

08:29 Tim

And so there was some debate in the newspaper. What surprised me was the city manager made the point, he said, “Oh, why don't they move the mine?” And I thought, This is extraordinary, that in a mining town like Kalgoorlie, the manager of the city didn't understand just some fundamentals.

08:51 Julie

That it needed to be in this particular place. Yeah, I guess there’s often surprising misconceptions and misunderstandings, even in the political sphere, where you might expect there to be a reasonable understanding of the issues related to mineral resources and mining, 

09:10 Tim

When I was Acting Director General, we had a very large conference room with a brand new table in there and a blank wall on one side. And what do we do with this blank wall? Now traditionally in the Mines Department, we'd have a picture of an offshore rig, and we'd have some guys at Kambalda underground with an air leg doing some drilling. And I just had decided some time ago, this was the wrong image we should be presenting to anybody,

09:40 Julie

Right.

09:40 Tim

anybody at all. I likened it to the food industry, where you don't see the slaughter yards, you see beautiful plates of food, you see people enjoying the lifestyle and things like that. So I just said, “We're going to have a series of images down this wall, which actually are all lifestyle images.”

09:46 Julie

Right.

09:47 Tim

and encourage people to ask the question, Why is this? This is the Mines Department. Why we got these images on the wall? Well, because every stage of your lifestyle relies on the mining sector,

10:00 Julie

Yep.

10:01 Tim

one way or another. And I think that's, that's something we still miss out on as an industry. We haven’t learnt that lesson.

10:09 Julie

Yeah, and I think it's particularly important, I think, now when there's this big, political and societal change towards more green technology and green energy. And there's this lingering misunderstanding, I think of the role of geosciences in all of that. And a lot of people still think of it as the bad guy, you know, whereas actually, it's a field that is essential to the development of those areas.

10:41 Tim

You're exactly right. 

The Premier, I think was Gallop, he’d been Premier for 12 months and his office put out a notice to departments saying, What can we do to celebrate four months of the new Premier, as a celebration of being 12 months in office. So I went back to the Premier's office, and I had a photograph of the desert, and a photograph of the geophysical plane with wires from the nose to the wings to the tail. And I had a coloured magnetic image of the land surface and I said, “This is what we can see on the ground. We put an aeroplane in the sky. This is what we can see on the same piece of ground”. And they thought that was pretty exciting. So the Premier came up to the survey and did a wander through with the TV cameras.

11:25 Julie

Excellent.

11:26 Tim

and so everybody was happy. You’ve got to grab these opportunities.

11:29 Julie

Yeah, and for your average survey geologist, who's really into the geology and the science, as they should be, and producing their maps, I think a lot of that, that just doesn't occur to them that their very existence is dependent on somebody who is making the case that this is really important, to the people who are making those decisions.

11:50 Tim

Yeah.

11:51 Julie

Who are often people who don't know anything about geology.

But how do you explain to non-geologists why we really need a geological survey?

12:00 Tim

I've always argued that in Western Australia, we're particularly lucky that the resources sector is so important to any government that's in power. And so, it's a matter of explaining its role in terms of that. And particularly, I think, the very strong argument is to say, well, if we're increasing our productivity, our mining output, which we seem to be doing, if we want to just sustain that, let alone increase it further, we've got to find new ore deposits. So how do we encourage the private sector to do that? We've got to find replacement ore, or we won’t have an industry for very long at all.

12:40 Julie

Yep.

12:40 Tim

And it's certainly the risk of rapid development and expansion of your industry. Because if you have rapid expansion, the chances are you’ll have rapid decline as well. 

Even if people don't fully appreciate, you know, why you have such a big iron ore industry, I think they do appreciate, particularly in a place like Perth, is why you need access to sand. Because we now are trying to develop housing projects in areas which are a little bit boggy. And unfortunately, the preferred method in Perth for building a house is to put a concrete slab on the ground and put some brick walls on top of the concrete slab. So in these boggy areas, they've got to bring sand in to raise the ground level so when you get a bad rain, it doesn't swamp the house. And so just that fundamental cost for somebody building in a, you know, a new suburb has this cost of finding sand. And you think in a place like Perth, on the Swan coastal plain, there's a lot of sand. Well there is but it's not that easy to get to now. And so that's just one example, I suppose, where it can come home to people when they're building their house that they have to have to get something like sand.

13:47 Julie

Yeah.

13:47 Tim

I think it's a really hard argument to play out unless people have to go without.

13:54 Julie

Yeah.

13:55 Tim

People just assume that they will have steel for the motor cars. There's a thing I call the Toni Collette syndrome. She was involved in a movie in the Pilbara.

14:02 Julie

The 2003 film, Japanese Story.

14:05 Tim

Which involved a mining project in the Pilbara. And it was quite a good Australian movie. I know when she was up there, she was taken around the Hammersly mine.

14:14 Julie

Yeah.

14:14 Tim

But she was on the Andrew Denton show. And she just said, “Oh, I was appalled at the size of the hole in the ground and the big equipment that’s driving around. This is shocking”. And I thought Andrew Denton lost a very good opportunity to pull her up and say, ‘Well, you know, do you drive a motor car? Do you live and work in the city? Where does the steel come from for the buildings? Where does the steel come from for the steel in your motor car? You actually have to have mines.’ Their whole lifestyle depends on mining.

14:47 Julie

Yeah.

14:48 Tim

Angela Riganti is a geologist in the Geological Survey, and she came from Namibia. And when she was working there, she worked at the museum. And I happened to be there shortly after she left and went to the museum. And she'd done a series of dioramas behind big glass windows, and presented rooms in a home and pointed out where those things came from,

15:13 Julie

Yep.

15:14 Tim

and what resources had to be mined to provide all the facilities in their room, including saying, well, the timber shelving comes from trees, but you have to mill that with steel saws. And sometimes they’ve got tungsten carbide cutting edges on them and this sort of stuff. 

15:31 Julie

Yeah.

15:32 Tim

It's fundamental. I suppose it's as fundamental as food and water to our modern lifestyle.

15:38 Julie

Yeah.

15:39 Tim

Although the community may want to argue against mining and clearing vegetation to open up a mine, I think it needs to be pointed out that we have to do that in a very considered and careful way. One of the things I always argued was that when you took somebody to an area to show them the impact of mining, you drive. Because they drive through hundreds of kilometres of bushland and come to a mine with a big hole in the ground and isn't this terrible, but they've just gone through 100 kilometres where there's no hole in the ground and it sort of puts it into perspective.

16:16 Julie

Yeah.

16:17 Tim

I used to show a satellite image of the southern part of Western Australia and I'd say, “Well you know, what's the impact of mining? Can we see it? And say, “Where's the biggest mine the south here?” And at the time it was the super pit. “Let's try and find the super pit”. We found Kalgoorlie first, Kalgoorlie-Boulder. “Oh, it’s impacted on the land surface, hasn't it? Oh the super pit’s smaller than the town site. Is mining all that bad?”

16:26 Julie

Yeah.

16:26 Tim

But what you do notice is all the agriculture, but agriculture is fine. We need food, but do we need resources?

16:33 Julie

Yeah, you're right people, if they don't understand how things directly impact them then it's very easy to dismiss mining as something we don't need. 

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