– copyright by Peter Vanderspuy, April, 2001.
Fellow romantics,
I
open my keynote address to you today with good news and bad news. The good news is that nothing I am going to
tell you is news to you. (You can all relax, sleep, play with your palm
computers or whatever it is you do with your hands in your lap region.) The bad news is that I am going to take half
an hour to tell you what you already know.
Why am I so impudent, you ask? Because I was born sixty years ago. My first real exploration syndicate was 40
years ago, chasing diamonds in competition with De Beers at 11,000 feet in the
mountains of the kingdom of Basutoland. (I came second, and came out of there
weighing just 45 kilograms.) I have
lived exploration as far back as I can remember (which is usually about two
weeks on a good day), and I have had the good fortune to explore in numerous
places on planet Earth. More
importantly, I have had the singular fortune of meeting, mixing and working and
drinking with a great number of mineral explorers. It is the distillation of these things that I offer you today.
Therefore
now let us begin:
In
the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and darkness was upon the face of
the deep.
And God said, “let there be light” and there
was light.
The
next 27 short verses deal with the creation of everything, including Man (but,
significantly, not woman).
Then,
on page 2 of this 1000 page book, we find that the river draining Eden has four
tributaries, and I quote “the first is Pison that drains the land of Havilah,
where there is gold and the gold of that land is good. There is also bdellium and the onyx stone…” We
mineral people get our first mention on page two. Hundreds of pages before the
first mention of the world’s oldest profession. Good on you Moses. You
obviously took the right tablets.
Most
of us know of this book, some of us have read some of it, and maybe a few of us
have endeavored to implement some of the ideas it contains. It is a book of
ideas. Some are ritualistic. Some are dogmatic. Most of the ideas are of an exploratory nature. I believe that is why this book remains in
print. (You can order it from Amazon dot com, or you can nip down to the lovely
little church just down the road and nick yourself a copy.).
My
topic is exploration. I am going to
address the following subjects:
·
What is exploration
·
Why do people explore
·
What is a successful explorer
·
What part does luck play
·
What characteristics are
common to explorers
·
What kinds of geologists are
there
·
What is an exploration
geologist
·
What is an exploration
geophysicist
·
What is a diamond drill
·
What is the significance of
scale
·
Finally, brawn, brain and
Bre-X
(Then
we break for lunch and I will sum up this afternoon.)
WHAT IS EXPLORATION
Exploration is looking for something. It might be a better mousetrap or it might
be for an answer to an observed phenomenon, this often being termed deductive
reasoning. (Demonstrate how a geophysicist does deductive reasoning.)
Two examples of looking for
something:
Two examples of deductive
reasoning:
These are two examples of using
cause and effect relationships in exploration.
Of course we can always bark up the wrong tree – so to speak. An example of which is John Towie and
Maureen Muggeridge panning the gravels of Smoke Creek at Argyle, looking for
the tell-tale garnets. And what did
they find? Diamonds! Some people can never get it right. "Spoilt our day", said John and Maureen.
Summary of exploration:
Exploration in the resource
industry is looking for ways to make money out of minerals. Exploration may
focus on finding new deposits.
Alternatively, it may focus on improving ways of unlocking the value of
known deposits. We must never be narrow
in our definition of exploration. Look at the door opened by cyanide extraction
of gold. The great leap forward from
Jason and the golden fleece, and the product of a Glaswegian chemist making
cough mixture for his mother-in-law, first applied to gold extraction at Waihi
in New Zealand in 1895. And look at how
our horizons rolled back with the application of CIL/CIP, which is not new
technology. And look at what sulphide
flotation did to our exploration horizons.
WHY DO PEOPLE EXPLORE:
In 1929, when Mallory, late
returned from his attempt on Everest, was asked by a pestering journo why he
tried to climb Everest, he replied, “because it is there”.
People explore for two reasons:
True explorers come from the
second category. Exploration is their
raison d’etre. (Which I think means that they eat raisins.).
WHAT IS A SUCCESSFUL EXPLORER:
I know the answer to this one but
I hesitate to tell you because you might think me a cynic, which I am not. But I will tell you anyway, in the interests
of science and truth.
A successful explorer is one who,
in the eyes of his or her peers, is considered to be a successful
explorer. That’s it. All about perception, I regret to say.
Miles D’Arcy. Who?
Mt Morgans and the oil in Persia.
Oh, Him! Paddy Hannan. Paddy Hannan! Our icon! I’m sorry;
Blind Freddy’s lame dog would have found the Golden Mile had he wandered 80
kilometers east of Coolgardie. Paddy
had only this one discovery to his name, let he lives in legend-land. James Balzarno had more than 30 discoveries
to his credit in Australia and New Zealand.
Yet today he is remembered as the idiosyncratic barrow man at the annual
Kalgoorlie Balzarno Barrow race. Ditto
for Ray Smith of Granny Smith fame, named after his wife the day she became a
grandmother. Ray had discoveries in
Australia, Albania, Colorado, Ontario, Ecuador, Haiti, Brazil, Venezuela and
Mexico. Ray Who? I am not a cynic. We should judge explorers by what they do, not by what other
people think they do.
WHAT
PART DOES LADY LUCK PLAY:
She is very important, provided
we use my definition of luck, which has two legs:
Every one of us has had the
occasional earth-shattering exploration idea, I am sure. Some of us have been lucky, which is to say,
we acted on that blinding flash of revelation that hit us at 2 am on our way
home from the pub, and that particular revelation brought fruit when it was
applied. Most don’t, I suppose that is what we mean by bad luck.
Luck comes from giving it a
go. It matters not how crazy the idea
may seem. I would love to tell you
about some of my current crazies but I am having a challenge with the patent’s
office. “Heavier than air machines can
not fly, please leave us alone” they say, after taking my money. But I can tell you about this one because it
is patented. Why dig rock up to get
metal? Why not just grow plants that
collect the metal from the soil formed from the metal-bearing rock? Then reap the plants and burn them. Hey presto, the ash is our instant
high-grade ore, ready for the smelter.
Trouble is, there are laws in this country against the commercial
cultivation of that plant that looks like a tomato plant. Go to Columbia, where the government
subsidises it. The mind reels. Get a high from the smoke while we are
creating our own orebodies.
WHAT CHARACTERISTICS ARE COMMON
TO EXPLORERS:
A long question that means how do
we recognize true explorers. Well, they
tend to a mix of romanticism and pragmatism.
They are simultaneously visionaries and doers; they are not
dreamers. They are iconoclasts and
scorn conventional wisdom. Yet they use
every available tool. In particular,
they absorb the experiences of others.
Their active pursuit of ideas and opportunities means that they have a
higher than average reward from Lady Luck.
Finally, their pursuit of opportunity results in a lot of serendipity –
doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.
The true mineral explorer does not have tunnel vision. The true explorer looks for what the rocks
can deliver, rather than deciding in advance what he or she wants from the
rocks.
Why be proud? If our target is manganese and we find the
Hamersley Range or Cerro dos Carajas; if our target is nickel and we find the
Venetia diamond pipe, why worry? Ray
Smith did not worry because on his prime nickel target he found the signposts
that led to Granny Smith.
WHAT KINDS OF GEOLOGISTS ARE
THERE:
Short answer; me and you, and I
have some doubts about you. Alternative
short answer: there are those that shower every day and there are the real
geologists, who change their underdaks once in the summer and less often in the
winter.
The longer answer is that there
are academic geologists, environmental geologists, engineering geologists,
exploration geologists and then there are Kiwi geologists: they are the ones to
be found in thorny scrub in the pouring rain.
And then there is the last kind of geologist - iconoclastic mavericks, commonly known as prospecting geologists
or minefinders. They are the ones who
explore for fun. They are never to be
found driving taxis.
WHAT IS AN EXPLORATION GEOLOGIST
USED FOR:
Like all geologists, an
exploration geologist has many hands, as in “on the other hand…”. Each hand represents a different but
equivocal and contestable opinion.
An exploration geologist is a
management tool, which is to say that Management chooses at random one of the
many hands to justify the spending of shareholder’s money to drill a diamond
drillhole.
Fortunately exploration
geologists are biodegradable because they get the blame for holes that fail to
find Lasseter’s Reef and their use-by date comes up faster than the rate at
which the share price heads for the Antarctic.
This is not necessarily a bad thing because Australia does need
interesting and universally-informed taxi drivers.
WHAT IS AN EXPLORATION
GEOPHYSICIST:
This is a quiz question. If anyone here knows the answer, write it on
not more than 12 pages and email it to me at Bermuda Triangle dot com. First prize is a previously-owned but well
cared for and regularly- serviced
exploration geophysicist.
My suspicion is that exploration
geophysicists are frustrated psychics.
Or Melbourne tram drivers or Sydney symphony orchestra aspirants, because
they have a fixation about conductors.
Life is full of surprise
discoveries and I made one last week in the pub in the hamlet of Fairlie in the
MacKenzie Country of South Island, which is on the right hand side of Tasmania,
for the reference of xenophobics. In
that pub I discovered in John Steinbeck’s transliteration of King Arthur that
Merlin was an exploration geophysicist.
Let me quote: “ Now Merlin was a
wise and subtle man with strange and secret powers of prophesy and those
deceptions of the ordinary and the obvious which are called magic.” Is that not a brilliant definition of an
exploration geophysicist? To clinch it,
I quote further: “Merlin knew the winding channels of the human mind, and also
he was aware that a simple open man (for which read geologist) is most
receptive when he is mystified, and Merlin delighted in mystery.” There you have it – incontrovertible
evidence in a nutshell, because we all know how exploration geophysicists
mesmerize geologists.
In practice, most exploration geophysicists
make it their business to find out what the exploration geologist wants to
hear. They then use black boxes to make
black magic to produce Leunig-style diagrams.
They use these diagrams to persuade the geologist to think that the
buried treasure is there. The
geophysicist produces dig-here maps for testing by twelve diamond drills. No one, including the geophysicists,
actually understand these dig-here maps, so it is a cop-out for everyone when
the twelve diamond drills turn up pure unadulterated granite uncontaminated by metals, and the geologists take up taxi
driving. Needless to say, diamond
drillers adore exploration geophysicists as passionately as they loathe
exploration geologists. I am led to
understand that the taxis driven by erstwhile exploration geologists are owned
by diamond drillers.
WHAT IS A DIAMOND DRILL:
This is a serious question and
has two answers, the second of which is an indictment.
Yes,
the diamond drill is the truth machine, but why not a laser drill and down-hole
neutron-activated qualitative and quantitative analysis for the whole periodic table? My patent is pending.
Indeed,
heavier-than-air flying machines took to the air 98 years ago. And 3500 years ago the Egyptians were
drilling core holes in extra tough dolerite.
Much the way we do it today, except that today it is not a hand job, so
to speak. We have satellite imagery,
geophysics and geologists electronic field notebooks. And we follow this by screwing a hollow pipe into the ground!
Surely
we are due for some leaps ahead, overdue, in fact. We need in-ground detection and identification of minerals and we
need in-situ, non-toxic mass mining, all imperative for environmental reasons,
let alone sound commercial reasons.
Would it not be ridiculous if we achieve this on the moon or Mars before
achieving it in our back yard called planet Earth.
We do
have one big leap ahead and it is thanks to Monsieur Daguerreau and Messers
Wilbur and Orville Wright. Air
photography, and satellite imagery. I
will comment on these under the following, which seems like a non-sequitur but
is not.
WHAT IS
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SCALE:
How
long does it take us to walk the long dimension of an “average” orebody –
excluding coalfields, oilfields, the Witwatersrand, the Bushveld Complex, the
Great Dyke, the Zambian Copperbelt and similar monsters? It takes us a few minutes to a few tens of
minutes. That’s the way we mineral
explorers have measured scale for thousands of years. And it all changed after World War Two, which, for those not as
aged as me, means 55 years ago. And
most of the change has been in the last 25 years.
When my
exploration career started in the early 1960’s in Darkest Africa, air photos
were a luxury, where they existed at all.
So I did my own, and, as some of you know, I have continued to this day,
occasionally flying foul – excuse the pun – of the aviation authorities, though
I refute the official allegation that I was guilty of flying underground at
Kanowna Belle. (With a Sheila maybe,
with an aeroplane – no!).
Air
photography achieved for us what Icarus would have achieved as a fringe benefit
had he not used wax rather than crazy glue.
Clearly a man before his time.
People
have always flown in their dreams and an interesting phenomenon is how
accurately dream fliers have recorded the terrain, built up from the brain’s microprocessor
making three-dimensional models from two-dimensional observations. Those of us who have worked with
unsophisticated indigenous people around the world will know how readily and
accurately they identify with air photo features and scale. Far better than many geologists.
The
advent of satellite imagery and air photography is an enormous leap forward for
explorers but it also presents us with new challenges. We can so easily now see things on global,
continental and regional scales and, in doing so, we can all too easily lose
sight of the dimensions of our targets.
Take, for example, the BMR’s 80,000-scale RC 9 photography of Australia. A 400-meter orebody is only 5 millimeters
and 5 millimeters is very small on a 22 by 22 centimeter air photo. In our GPS-navigated four by four, we drive
its length in seconds, not minutes.
I love
using satellite imagery and air photos in exploration and that is why I fly
small aeroplanes. Using air photos, I
stickybeak from 10,000 feet down to kangaroo-hopping height, tying together in
my mind’s eye the various features as seen from different heights. From regional scale to local scale and down
to site-specific scale. It is exciting
and rewarding, for example, correlating an air photo feature with a vegetal
anomaly that is visible only from a height of around 500 feet.
Interestingly,
in Canada the light aircraft remains a prospector’s tool. It is underutilized in Australia and more
the pity, given our terrain and user-friendly nature of most of Australia for
light aircraft. Some of you will
remember Leo Miller of Teas Gulf. He
spent much of his time in the air all over Australia, prospecting at speeds
that caused birds to fly past him.
Summarising
on scale, we should all make a habit of walking our targets. Do all the other things, and follow through
with feet on ground, to get the correct space – time perspective. No way better than by stopping to brew a
billy and allowing the brain to assimilate and process the multiplicity of
scales that today confront us.
Before
passing from the ridiculous to the sublime, I have something more to add about
geophysics. Fortunately it sums up in
four sentences, being the normal concluding paragraph of any self-respecting
exploration geophysicist’s report. It
goes like this:
“The
conductors run in parallel lines,
This is
a condition you find in all the big mines,
They
run low in the valleys and high in the hills,
And
should be tested by twelve diamond drills.”
I am
not sure if exploration geophysicists are in league with the devil but it is
clear that they are in joint venture with the diamond drillers.
BRAIN
BRAWN AND BRE-X
If we
really seek exploration success we each need a company called either Accident
NL or Chance NL, because it seems that all mines were discovered either by
accident or by chance.
I am
going to conclude this offering to you today by listing mines or discoveries
under the headings of brain, brawn and Bre-X.
It is for you to decide if my selections are appropriate.
BRAINS
Argyle,
Boddington, Bougainville, Cadia –Ridgeway, Cannington, Century, Cerro dos
Carajas, Ekati, Ertzberg, Ernest Henry, Gove, Hamersley, Hellyer, Jabiluka,
Kambalda, Lihir, Lucky Draw, Macarthur River, Murrin Murrin, Ok Tedi, Orapa,
Porgera, Platinum in the Bushveld and Great Dyke Complexes, Tanami, Telfer,
Venetia, Witwatersrand.
BRAWN (includes serendipity and persistence)
Broken
Hill, Great Central, Plutonic, Sunrise, Voisey’s Bay, Wallaby.
BRE-X
Under
this heading I include all exercises in which greed and the lemming instinct
have taken over from rational thought and responsible behaviour. I leave it to each of you to make your own
list. Mine remains private property.
It
matters not whether the discovery comes
from brain or brawn. The only thing
that matters is that we keep on looking, using every tool that is available to
us.
Ladies
and gentlemen, for the indulgence with which you have listened to an enthusiast
for the orderly and proper discovery and development of planet Earth’s mineral
resource endowment, I thank you very warmly.
END