Uluru

Alice Springs isn’t the biggest or liveliest town I have ever visited, but it is where our adventure to Uluru (or Ayers Rock) began. Myself and two friends from work, Steff and Clement, flew to Alice Springs and arrived into a small airport not unlike the one we fly into for work. The next day we were picked up bright and early for our 3 day organised tour out to the rock. There were about 15 people on the tour from all over the place (but mainly Germany) and we embarked on the 5 hour (yes 5 HOUR!!!!) drive out from Alice to Uluru through the flat, dry, fairly uninspiring outback where rain might not fall for years on end.

Steff, Clement and myself at Uluru

We arrived at the national park in time for a quick spot of lunch before driving straight out to Uluru where our tour guide took us on a quick walk, telling us some of the Aboriginal stories surrounding the rock and showing us some traditional Aboriginal art. Aboriginal boys, when they are ready to become men, do something called walkabout. If they return to their tribe after years of surviving on their own in the most hostile environment you can imagine, the Australian outback, they are initiated into the tribe as a man. Part of their initiation in the area surrounding Uluru involved climbing up and over the rock.

Ayers Rock

There are many traditional sacred sites around the rock, including parts solely for the use of men or women (known as men’s and women’s sites). You are not allowed to film or photograph these parts of the rock, which is why you only ever see one side of Uluru in photographs. Traditional Aboriginals will not have their photograph taken as they believe this will trap part of their soul when they move onto the next life, and you cannot publish the name of a deceased tribe member. You are able to climb up Uluru (and it’s not an easy climb, trust me!) however the local Aboriginals discourage this for many reasons including health, safety and cultural reasons. I did the walk around Uluru which took several hours. And yes, it really is just a pretty big rock.

Kata Tjuta

That evening we drove out to a viewpoint over Uluru to eat dinner and watch the sunset over the rock, which was pretty special. That night we camped out under the stars around the campfire in big, thick, waterproof sleeping bags called swags. It was surprisingly warm and comfortable despite the cold outside. The next morning we were up at 5am to catch the sunrise over Uluru, then after breakfast we headed onto the neighbouring rock formation called Kata Tjuta (also known as the Olgas). Both Uluru and Kata Tjuta were formed at the same time- both started life as huge basins (bowls in the ground) with a river flowing through them from the nearby mountains. In the first basin all the big, heavy rocks dropped out of the river, which eventually became Kata Tjuta. The second basin contained the finer sands and silts, and this formed Uluru. Both are made from the same rock but both have very different appearances. We did another long hike through the beautiful Kata Tjuta formation.

Looking over the edge at King's Canyon

The next day we visited King’s Canyon, Australia’s answer to the Grand Canyon. Again we were up bright and early to avoid the blistering heat of the midday sun, and hiked through the canyon for hours. I was pretty worn out by the end of it! We rounded off the tour with a visit to a camel farm. Did you know Australia is the world’s biggest exporter of camels- us Europeans thought they would do well in the desert? They did.

The next day we did a day tour to the nearby West MacDonnell ranges, which are a series of hills around Alice Springs. We spent the day driving along the ranges, seeing features along the way. Not quite as spectacular as Uluru but splendid nonetheless. Alice Springs itself is not all that lively, considering the volumes of people that pass through on their way to Uluru. It is named after the wife of the explorer who founded the town- a mission that took several attempts and many months in order to connect Adelaide in the south to Darwin in the north.

 

Myself, Clement and Steff at Ormiston Gorge along the West MacDonnell Ranges

Perth



Ruth, myself and Anna on Christmas Eve

 The first day I arrived in Perth, it rained. And it has rained a lot since. But it has been sunny, and it is a great place to live. The house I live in is in a suburb called Carlisle- about 10 minutes away from the centre of town on the train, south of the Swan River. The house is enormous considering there are 3 of us living in it- myself, Anna and Ruth. I have the peasant’s quarters, so named because I had no job when we moved in and inherited most of my furniture from other people. Now I have a job and have splashed out on a bedside table. Last year we had a housewarming BBQ and we hosted Christmas dinner for us and a couple of friends and their family who were over here visiting.





Perth city from King's Park



Perth is a massive city, divided into hundreds of suburbs, each big enough to be called a town. On the train it can take over 30 minutes to get from the outskirts of the city into the city centre. It is an odd place, a little backwards in some ways, like a lot of Australia. For example, most shops in Perth are not open on a Sunday- and 24 hour supermarkets are non-existent. You’d be lucky to find one that stays open until 9pm. The metro train system is designed specifically to irritate the commuter; you will often see your connecting train leaving the station a mere 20 seconds after you arrived train 3 platforms over with no hope of making the train on time. And you know your next train will be leaving in 30 minutes. Sometimes though Perth will astound you with something (nothing comes to mind right now) and you think ‘why on earth hasn’t anyone else thought of that yet?!!’.

  

The centre of the city often has street performers and has some very good shopping. Just a short walk away is the Swan River, running all the way out to the west to the coast. Perth is only about 20 minutes’ drive from the nearest beach, and has some spectacular beaches all in an easy drive (I say drive because you invariably need a car to get to anywhere you actually want to go to). Just down the road is the coastal town of Fremantle, which is a great place to go and eat and shop and just walk around. We often go and watch the many ships coming in to port- it recently hosted an international sailing competition like Cowes week.

The Pinnacles

 Over Christmas we did a bit of travelling around to see some more of the area. There’s Caversham Wildlife Park where we got to see all sorts of native Australian wildlife, and I saw my first kangaroos (I ate them before I got to see them, and very tasty they are too). We went to a beautiful park called Yanchep where there are wild kangaroos and I saw koalas for the first time. A few hours’ drive to the north is the Pinnacles national park, which are thought to be ancient fossilised trees or tree roots (nobody is quite sure), and the coastal town of Cervantes.

Feeding the 'roos at Caversham Wildlife Park

My favourite place in all of Australia so far though has to be Margaret River, 3 hours to the south. This is the premier wine growing region of Western Australia, and is very English countryside in its appearance. It is a beautiful part of the world, with sandy beaches, turquoise seas and plenty of wine and good places to eat. There are also caves and lighthouses to see. I have been twice so far with various friends, and can’t wait for my next trip down there (my wine cellar is getting a bit low!).

Sunset at Margaret River



Wine tasting in Margaret River

On the beach on Christmas Day



 

The Midas Touch

A drill rig: the tall vertical bit is the drill which pumps sample
into the big red thing where the offsider is collecting the
samples in green bags- one bag = 1m of drilled earth

Producing gold isn't quite as easy as having the Midas Touch- it takes several years of work to go from a bare stretch of land to an operating gold mine. Firstly, if an area looks like it might have some gold, you have to acquire a licence to explore that land (it doesn't mean you own the land, and means you are only allowed to do a certain amount of work on that land).

Next, you need to make a plan about where you are going to look for gold and why. Most of the time the land that we take on has already been previously explored by another company so there are historical datasets and reports that we can look through to see what they have found before. We use this, and the geophysical data we have along with fieldwork to compose proposals about what we want to do next to further explore the area. This could be a soil sampling program, further geophysical surveys or if you are pretty sure about an area, we would propose a drill program.

Out doing some fieldwork in the sunshine

Once you have chosen where you are going to look for gold, you have to get environmental and heritage clearances on that land to make sure there isn't any particular wildife of historic aboriginal sites that you will be disturbing by working there.

Depending on the size of the area the drill program could be 10 drill holes or it could be 100's, and there are multiple different types of drilling you can do depending on what the ground conditions are and what information you want to get from the drilling. The cheapest type of drilling cannot drill very deep and only produces rock chips, but it is good when you are first exploring an area to see what might be out there. Usually you don't hit the gold deposit using this type of drilling, but when gold is formed in the earth there are a lot of chemicals associated with it and from these chemicals you can judge where the gold may be at depth.

Using the information from your first pass of drilling and you have a better idea of where the gold is, you can do a second phase of drilling which still gives rock chips but can go deeper and gives you more information about the bedrock. With all drill holes, samples are sent off to the labs to test for gold and other key chemicals that could indcate gold. While you are drilling, you keep a log of what rock types there are, any structures you see and whether the rocks have been altered by chemicals.

Me and Vaughan on a visit to the Kalgoorlie "superpit"- the pit that keeps Kalgoorlie in business! It produces
850,000 oz gold every year, which at $1400/oz is some serios money! The bucket that I am standing on is one that's used to shift all that ore!

If it looks like you have a really good gold deposit then you can use diamond drilling (which means the drill bits have industrial diamonds in them for strength). Diamond drilling produces a cylinder of rock that can be 100's of metres long (not all in one piece though!). From this you can clearly see the structures in the rock and the areas where the rocks have been altered- often you need both to find gold. However this is the most expensive kind of drilling, so you only use it when you know you have something good!

A field trip in January to learn about the local geology- 8 cars
in a row!

This whole exploration process in itself can take years and cost $100,000's, and sometimes the area you target just doesn't have enough gold in it and so it gets thrown out. But if you find a deposit that is big enough to mine, you pass that area onto the resource development team, who spend many months doing further modelling and drilling to define exactly where the gold is.

 

When the directors are happy that the target is going to make enough money, they will give the OK to mine it. At Integra we currently have 2 open pit mines (meaning we dig a big hole to get the gold out) and we have just started our 1st underground mine, and we have several more targets that are almot ready to mine.

Workin' in a gold mine....

My shift starts with a leisurely 4.30am ride to the airport on a Thursday morning, where my commute to work begins via Qantas jet. My office... the Australian outback!



Working hard (or hardly working) in the office

 I live and work at Mt Monger Station, previously a farm, which is about a 40 minute drive from the nearest town called Kalgoorlie. It's a bit of a one-horse town (it comes with its own high street of wild west-styled buildings) but as far as mining towns go it's pretty good. The offices we are based in are essentially portacabins- metal boxes which are much like an oven in the 40 degree summer heat and a fridge/freezer during the depths of winter. Currently it's a bit crowded and sometimes I'm allowed a desk (but rarely a working computer).

My main job is as the company geophysicist (in training), which means that I coordinate all upcoming geophysics surveys for all the different projects here. Geophysical surveys measure energy (either from a natural source like an earthquake or a man-made source like an electrical probe) that travels through the ground, and from that energy we can interpret what we think the ground looks like beneath the surface. This helps the project geologists as often they cannot tell what rock types are beneath the surface unless they drill it, which is usually more expensive than doing a geophysics survey. This also means I am looking after $100,000's worth of surveys (no biggy!).



Collecting rock samples for analysis in the field



When I am not pretending to be a geophysicist, I help out the geologists with their work. There are 4 exploration projects currently, each with 2 geologists, and each project looks after 10-15 different targets in which they are looking for an economic gold deposit. We use lots of different techniques to find gold, including doing soil samples, undertaking geophysical surveys, and completing drill programs to identify structures and rock bodies that hold gold. Quite often the gold is not visible in the rocks, but is mixed with other chemicals so we actually need to look for a large number of signals to see if there is gold!



The area in which we are searching for gold is called the goldfields, so there is gold pretty much everywhere. However there are a lot of factors that dictate whether or not we dig that gold up. For example, we might find a large pot of gold in the middle of nowhere, but if there is not a place to process the gold nearby then we would have to set up all the infrastructure and the mill to actually produce the gold. We would only do that if there was so much gold that we could still make a profit.



Summer thunderstorms



That, in a nutshell, is what I do as an exploration geologist working for a gold mining company. It is fun and exciting and terrifying all at the same time, and every day is new and different and long. But the enormous outback storms and the friendly resident lizard Frank and the fact I don't have to cook or clean for myself makes the 70 hour working week worthwhile!