It was June 1997. In Perth, a bad recession was taking hold. I tried to get work, but there was nothing going; the jobs tap had been turned off.
The gold industry downturn bit hard for months that turned to years; it coincided with a mainstream economic slump that added to the misery. Going for a job was academic: there weren’t any jobs. The joke doing the rounds at the time was about a geologist applying for a job at a McDonald’s restaurant in Perth.
‘So, I have a bachelor of science in geology, five years’ work and management experience, a wife and two kids to feed, and am keen to get the job,’ says the desperate geologist.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ replies the McDonald’s manager. ‘Most of my other geologists have got PhDs.’
It was a bit like that. I stacked some shelves at a hardware store, got involved in local politics and tried my best to get a job.
My parents in the UK were now elderly and I used the last of my cash to visit them and my sister Aileen, who lived in London. Jane was working as a missionary in Nepal, so I missed out on seeing her.
I spent my spare time at the Department of Mines offices in the city, researching how the tenement system worked. A tenement was a mineral concession area that could be applied for by an individual or a company. To create or float some kind of resources company, I would need control of mining tenements. To peg these tenements, I would need money. So first I had to get some money.
Raising money from others for a mining venture during an industry bust was not likely to happen, especially given my lack of experience. I would have to use my own, but earning cash in the middle of a recession in which one’s own profession has disappeared is not easy. Once more I had to amend my career path, which meant starting at the bottom of the heap again with the only thing going – the job no one else wanted.
I applied to a company called Baker Hughes Inteq for a position they described as geological logger on offshore oil rigs. It all sounded terrific at the interview, except the pay, which was terrible: A$140 per day, almost a third of what I had previously earned as a contract geologist at the height of the boom. But this was not a boom, it was a bust, and I was happy just to have scored a job.
Three days later I was on a helicopter taking off from Karratha on the remote north-western coast of Western Australia. My destination was the offshore drilling rig the Ocean Epoch.
We flew westwards over pristine outliers of the Ningaloo Reef (a point of contention was having oil drilling so close to this reef). As we were flying fairly low, I could plainly see the clear blue water and the scattered reef below. I also saw a whale shark effortlessly gliding along. It was massive, around 10 metres in length, grey with regular cream-coloured spots and some stripes. This was not only the largest fish on earth but, after whales, the largest living creature on earth. I hoped the oil rig was carefully managing its environmental obligations. (The oil company was Woodside Energy, and it was.)
My job was only called geological logger by the guy conducting the job interview; the rest of the world’s oil industry called it mud-logging. On the rig, the place where I worked was a converted sea container fitted out with electronic equipment used to monitor and record the drilling of the oil well.
The person in charge of this mud-logging unit, the data engineer, was a smooth-talking American geologist who lived in Thailand. Everyone called him Spunky because at any one point in time there was always a woman, somewhere in the world, pregnant with his child – or so he claimed.
Spunky explained mud-logging to me.
‘Catch the stream of cuttings [small pieces of rock] that are brought up from the bottom of the drill hole, look at them and describe the sample on the mud-log. It’s just like a woman, Jim: you catch, you investigate and you interpret,’ he said.
Spunky was something of a poet, which must have been helpful in achieving his ambitious procreation targets.
It sounded easy enough: the same principle as the drill logging in Meekatharra, just on a larger scale. I learned a new set of skills and, after a couple of hitches, I was promoted to data engineer. This more responsible position involved monitoring and recording the workings of the drilling.
I reported directly to the wellsite geologist, who was the oil company’s geological representative on the rig. After working for twelve hours, I retired to a four-man bunked room to try and sleep through the stench and noise of the rig and my snoring sleeping companions. This was the routine every day for twenty-eight days. No days off: not much point in that.
Oil rigs have a lot of politics, mainly centred on blame-shifting for the horribly expensive screw-ups that regularly occur. I had a strong grounding in blame-shifting from the military, so I felt quite at home.
At the company man’s (the boss’s) morning meeting I would defend the mud-loggers’ corner.
‘The mud-loggers’ sensors are not working. They should have seen the tanks overflowing,’ the mud engineer would complain in his wheedling Scottish accent.
‘Not so, mate. We gave the call three times, but your derrickman didn’t pick up the phone,’ I would reply.
The mud engineer didn’t seem to like mud-loggers much, and it was mutual.
The Ashes cricket was on and the English were getting smashed in the December 1998 Adelaide Test match. The mud engineer had recently become an avid fan of the Australian cricket team, which was odd because he had no understanding of the game. However, he got a caustic pleasure out of taunting the small English contingent on board.
After a month on the rig my break came around. I was sitting with two other guys in the mess waiting for the chopper to arrive. One of the guys was a senior executive with the oil company and we were discussing his fear of flying.
‘I just keep going over the flying statistics in my head to convince myself how safe it is,’ he told us. He looked quite green around the gills, and we tried to reassure the poor guy as best we could.
We all glumly looked out of the window at the atrocious weather. There was a 6-metre swell, with driving wind and rain blowing horizontal spray off the whitecaps; the rig was moving around quite a bit too. It was touch and go as to whether the chopper could land, and the storm was not helping the executive.
My nemesis the mud engineer sidled up to our table, cradling a cup of tea. He didn’t know who the others were, but he couldn’t resist a parting shot at me.
‘Pretty bad weather out there today, Jim,’ he said.
‘Yes, it does look nasty,’ I said.
He sucked in a deep breath through his teeth. ‘Hope the chopper doesn’t go down,’ he said, then sauntered off.
‘Who the fuck is that arsehole?’ asked the aerophobic executive.
I obligingly wrote the name down for him.
We never saw that particular mud engineer again on the Ocean Epoch.
Eventually, hard work, a bit of luck and help from a friend called Carl Madge landed me a job as a wellsite geologist for Woodside. Finally, I had a more responsible job and the kind of decent money that could leverage me back into acquiring some mining tenements, which might lead to bigger things.
The wellsite geologist (just known as ‘wellsite’) is responsible for managing and reporting all of the offshore geological aspects of drilling the oil well. Some of the drilling rigs cost up to a million dollars per day to operate, so I didn’t want to be the person responsible for a screw-up that cost rig time (for instance, having to re-run the data-gathering wireline logs).
I built up my experience drilling well after well; they were invariably dry (no hydrocarbons). The Asset Team oil company geologists in town would often call asking the depths of the different geological formations we encountered while drilling. Were these formations higher than predicted (‘high’) or lower (‘low’)?
Oil and gas are always targeted to lie below a constraining cap rock (for example, a shale). Under the cap rock was the reservoir rock (usually a sand), which contained, you hoped, the goodies. The hydrocarbons always lined up from top to bottom by order of density: firstly gas, then oil and then the unwelcome water. The water level was generally constant throughout the field, so if you could raise the top of the gas by the geology (and thus, more importantly, the cap rock) coming in high, you got more gas and oil.
On one eagerly anticipated well, the inevitable question came through.
‘Jim, are we coming in high or low?’ the Asset Team geologists asked me.
‘We’re coming in twenty metres high,’ I replied, and we were all keyed up.
As we drilled deeper, I watched the geophysics or MWD (measurement while drilling, which told you the rock type and hydrocarbon/water type you were drilling through) on the screen in the mud-logging unit. We drilled through the shale cap rock and into the sandstone hydrocarbon reservoir. This was always the most stimulating part of drilling a well: what have we discovered?
I looked at the screen: we were in gas. Then, 20 metres later the gas changed to oil and 30 metres later we hit the water. This was a good result: a 50-metre hydrocarbon column.
After years of planning the well, the Asset Team was ecstatic, and rightly so. It was good to get a result: only one exploration well in ten was a discovery.
I liked working for Woodside, but I still needed to maximise my earnings in order to have enough capital to initiate a float or set up a resource company when the time came. So I was most interested when another wellsite-geologist opportunity came up in Pakistan.
It was 2001, and the 9/11 attack on the twin towers in New York had just happened. Just over the border from Pakistan, in Afghanistan, war was raging.
Not surprisingly, oil company BHP Billiton was having trouble filling the role. I looked at the salary package and realised I could achieve my financial goals and get my mining tenements far more quickly with this Pakistan job than by staying on at Woodside. Otherwise I would still be on an Australian oil rig in twenty years’ time doing the same old thing.
How risky can Pakistan be? I went for it.
Three weeks later I was at Dubai International Airport, waiting to connect with my flight to the Pakistani city of Karachi. I walked around the terminal to get some exercise, admiring the exotically dressed people from all over the globe. As I wandered past a particular departure lounge desk there appeared to be a serious dispute in full swing, with desperate passengers besieging airline staff.
With detached interest, I looked up at the flight destination board.
Karachi. Oh shit. That was my flight.
I negotiated the chaos of the airline desk without having any idea what all of the shouting was about. This was a forerunner of every queue I would ever see in Pakistan, where arguing with officials appeared to be something of a national pastime.
The departure lounge was full to bursting with men; there were no women or children. Many had long straggly beards and were mostly dressed in the loose clothing and hats also worn by the Taliban fighters in Afghanistan you saw on the news every night.
On board I sat next to two friendly Arabs in dishdashas both holding live hunting hawks on their arms. Falconry is a common sport in the Middle East, and the bird-rich Indus delta in Pakistan was a popular destination for the activity.
At Karachi I transferred to an ancient 747 for an internal flight to Islamabad, where I was met and whisked off to the BHP staff house in the diplomatic quarter of the city. There I was greeted by the chief drilling engineer, a dour Welshman called Griff who walked with a limp. He was a devout Christian and was recovering from being blown up in a church in Islamabad where he had been delivering a sermon a few weeks earlier.
Some terrorist wannabe, inspired by 9/11, had rolled a few grenades into the church, and shrapnel had lodged in Griff ’s leg. He was one of forty injured in the attack, in which five people were killed. The post-9/11 atmosphere in Islamabad was febrile.
It was around 11 p.m. and I fell into bed and went straight to sleep, pleased that my edgy journey was now safely over.
CRACK!
I awoke to the unmistakable sound of a high-calibre rifle going off, right outside my door. I jumped out of bed, grabbed some trousers and dived into a cupboard. Ever since my boarding-school days I have had a phobia about getting attacked without having trousers on.
A commotion was starting up in the corridor. I could not decipher the language, but it sounded like someone getting seriously lambasted. I left the cupboard and cautiously stuck my head out of my room door.
An officer was shouting at a cowering guard; he turned to me.
‘I am most humbly offering my very gracious apologies, sir, for this grossly incompetent man,’ said the officer.
The guard had negligently discharged his weapon in the stairwell while doing his night-time rounds.
The BHP Islamabad office was staffed by a group of smart, well-educated Pakistani men and women from the upper echelons of society. It was a stimulating place to work and I immersed myself in the new culture and routine.
During my time there, I got to know a couple of the younger women and learnt of their difficult dilemma. They were well educated, westernised and Muslim. The cultural traditions in Pakistan, though, were pervasive. Women were expected to marry young, serve their husbands and have children.
The male counterparts to these women were already accounted for through family-arranged marriages, often to much younger women. The men willingly went along with this tradition. For the women, arranged marriages were more problematic. Men seeking educated, proficient and slightly older (than the teenage alternative) women were not in great supply, and many of these attractive women were basically left on the shelf.
I got on uncommonly well with one of these women, who was most striking. We became quite close in a platonic way and, sensing her dilemma, I offered to take her back to Australia with me. She sensibly declined; there were too many family and religious taboos to overcome for her – or that’s what she said. I was disappointed by her answer, as I had grown most fond of this elegant young woman.
Islamabad was designed and built in the 1960s as the modern capital of Pakistan. It had broad tree-lined streets and imposing public buildings. There were some excellent restaurants and numerous cheap shops selling any product you could imagine, pirated goods being a speciality. I gave my reading glasses to an optician and three hours later he had created three new identical pairs and charged me $10.
Our offices and accommodation were in the leafy diplomatic quarter, and it was a decent billet. There was the constant threat of kidnapping, with or without a beheading, depending on whether your employer coughed up the ransom. So to prevent BHP’s worst nightmare (not to mention the kidnapee’s), there was some considerable, albeit rather bizarre, security. A simple trip to the shops was a surreal experience.
‘Ahmer, stop here, at the chemist,’ I instructed the driver.
I got out to buy some medicine (no prescription required). Two armed bodyguards jumped out of the back of the car and followed me, two paces behind, brandishing their loaded AK-47s. One of the bodyguards was the same man who had discharged his rifle in the stairwell of the staff house the night of my arrival, which gave my retail experience something of an edge.
One day I gave my bodyguards the slip and got away on a day trip to the scenic hill station of Murree in the foothills of the Himalayas, the place the British colonials would escape to in the heat of the summer. If I had kept going north that day, I would have ended up in Osama Bin Laden’s home town of Abbottabad, only 65 kilometres away.
After a couple of weeks in the office, I flew down to the BHP drill rig site in central Sindh province, on the irrigated floodplain of the Indus River.
It was the dry season, and hot. Even by Australian standards, it was damn hot: 48° Celsius in the shade, and there wasn’t much of that. The local airport was empty: no cars (other than ours) and no planes. Just a piece of unused infrastructure, paid for by a World Bank loan, to be repaid by people with nothing.
We drove through the rural poverty of Sindh – a struggling mass of humanity in a dustbowl. No stunted bush was without some family taking in the stippled shade. There were people everywhere; how on earth did they live?
We drove through a complex of elevated canals, which the British had built a century before. The brown-earth levees seemed to tower above the flat, arid landscape in a most unlikely manner. Each village was surrounded by a thick mud-brick wall – to keep out night-time marauders trying to steal women, I was told.
After about an hour’s drive we arrived at the drill rig site, modernity sitting incongruously in the rural landscape. I observed the usual derrick, mud tanks and lay-down areas that I was used to, except this time they were on land rather than at sea.
I went into the office and was met by the night company man, a cocksure young Australian with a worrying amount of self-confidence – Sean Curnow.
‘Hey, mate, did you fuck anyone on the way here?’ Sean asked unhelpfully.
‘No, mate, couldn’t choose which offer to take up,’ I said.
The Australian company man walked in. He was a good-oldboy and one of the rudest fuckers I have ever met. The safety officer was an ancient bloke from London, whose sole topic of conversation was his scrupulously documented attempt to have sex with every hooker in Asia.
It was going to be a long tour.
Things started looking up when I met the Pakistani crew. The mud-loggers were well led, switched on and keen: a good outfit. The local drill crew was also professional, with a most charismatic leader. They were all diligent and hard working.
My accommodation was in a small sea container right next to the mud-logging unit. It was a good base, with private office, bedroom and ablutions, except someone had parked the rig toilet right next to the air conditioning intake. After two nights of gagging, I managed to get the toilet moved. I shared this space with a back-to-back colleague, also from Australia; he and I worked alternate four-week hitches and so were never there at the same time, apart from during the handover.
We got drilling. The Zamzama gas project produced around 20 per cent of Pakistan’s gas and was an important strategic asset of the country. In terms of return on capital, it was BHP’s most profitable project worldwide: a decent prize.
The project area was well protected and the army was camped out all around us. This sort of worked, except the main pipeline north would get blown up now and again by disaffected tribesmen seeking leverage for pay-offs.
I settled into my rig routine, ensuring the geological data from the well was properly recorded and reported. Once the mud-loggers were up to speed, the job was easy and left me with a fair amount of free time on my hands.
Wellsite geologists often have this dilemma, and you have two choices: you can use the time to self-improve, read useful books and increase your skills, or you can watch DVDs, read trashy magazines and do nothing. I had in the past trodden a line between the two; now I was determined to use the time wisely.
My rotation was four and four (four weeks at the wellsite followed by four weeks out on break), with business-class airfares thrown in. This was luxury after some of the gigs I had been on. I also had a lovely girlfriend in Perth, a West Aussie local, Julie Mackay, so life was good.
After my first four weeks of work and then break in Perth, I flew back into Dadu.
Now the plains of Sindh were like a different country. The monsoon was in full swing and the dust had been replaced by a sea of mud. Our car crawled along washed-out roads, dodging the chaos from various accidents.
Before the rain the people had appeared to be listless and bored, which, given the heat, was understandable. Now there was a madcap rush of endeavour in the fields: ploughing, planting and weeding.
Some BHP surveyor clearly knew his stuff, because when I arrived at the rig it sat on one of the patchwork pieces of higher ground. My back-to-back colleague had left a couple of weeks earlier due to a rig move, and so I prised open the door to our empty unit with some trepidation.
It was like one of those cartoons where a flood of water hits you as you open the door. Except this wasn’t water – it was mice. There were hundreds of them. The unit was totally eaten out. We had made the mistake of storing various food items in there. The mice had even eaten through the rubber seal of the closed fridge. I gagged on the stench.
Even having seen what some of the local people ate, it was still unbelievable what Pakistani mice would eat. Large portions of my personal effects had been digested and excreted: work clothes, boots, books, cables, you name it.
I set up a small Honda generator outside the unit and pumped in the exhaust fumes through a hosepipe. An hour later it was all over. Carbon monoxide had won. With the help of one of the room boys and after two days of clean up, I finally managed to move back in for a mouse-free slumber. Inevitably, some mice remained dead in the roof insulation, and the smell could only be tolerated with a lot of incense.
During the next three days it rained solidly and the surrounding floodwater inexorably rose, but we seemed to be OK on the higher ground. On the third morning, I woke up with a pleasant wet-dream–like sensation. A girl was rubbing my leg: bliss.
Hang on, something really is rubbing my leg.
But it wasn’t a girl – what the hell was that? I leapt out of bed.
I could see at least two of them. I pussyfooted from the bedroom into the office: more snakes. Holy shit, they were absolutely everywhere. I fled in a towel.
Outside the unit I looked at the rig site in amazement. It was like a scene out of a zombie movie, where people rush around like madmen randomly smashing things. A horrible dawning came over me.
The rig was now the only dry area in an inland sea.
Every single wild animal within the flood plain was now on our tiny island. There were frogs, toads and lizards of every size and shape wedged into any nook or cranny they could find. Hundreds of birds were resting on available ledges or cables. Most worrying of all, there were snakes – everywhere. Some of the more enterprising of these reptiles had slithered up the electrical cabling and into my unit.
Two days of non-stop snake hunting at the rig brought some order to the scene, but one poor bugger exiting the mosque – a portable sea container – with bare feet stepped onto a saw-scaled viper, which bit him on the foot.
BHP flew the guy to the Aga Khan hospital in Karachi, which is the best hospital in Pakistan. He died five days later.
If the bite victim had gone to the local hospital in Dadu he almost certainly would have lived. This public hospital was horribly under-resourced, but the doctors there were no mugs. They dealt with around five of these snakebites every single day. They had horses on site to make the anti-venom: a standard technique in which the horse is exposed to the poison and creates the anti-venom, which is extracted from the horse’s blood. The treatment had been finessed through trial and error over many years, resulting in a near-perfect survival rate for snakebites.
After this fatality, BHP began sponsoring and assisting the local hospital. I drew a moral from this story. In the world of medicine, as in other walks of life, all that glistens is not gold.
In commercial geology there are two sides to the coin: ‘hard rock’, which is the minerals and mining industry, and ‘soft rock’, which is the oil and gas industry. Most geologists start and end their careers in one or the other. Out of necessity, I had ended up working in soft rock, but in my heart I was a hard-rock guy. I was not quite a man in a woman’s body, but you get the idea.
So I did my paying job on the rig and I dreamt of the day when I could return to prospecting for that gold or diamond mine.
That was my time ‘on’ the rig. But how did I spend each of my months ‘off’ the rig during the two years of flying between Pakistan and Perth?
For the first time in my working career, this BHP job gave me access to a new toy, which radically changed the isolation of remote-area work. The internet was a revelation. I spent my free time on personal study, and as a result became quite knowledgeable about a subject that already fascinated me: diamond exploration geology.
Maybe diamonds, and not gold, were my ticket to a float?
To float a resource company on the ASX, I needed some kind of asset. The cheapest way to get this asset would be to peg tenements prospective for a mineral, preferably a mineral that was currently attracting investment. Then, I would have to convince enough people to part with their hard-earned money to back me and my new mineral project, raising a bundle of cash and floating the company in the process.
Of course, after the float, the hard bit was to find, or ‘prove up,’ a mineral deposit worth mining. This was where the real wealth was created, but at least by this point I would have raised the money to pursue this risky endeavour. I would also have exposure to any increase in the share price through a significant shareholding in the now listed company.
With this rough plan in mind, I signed up to attend a diamond exploration conference that happened to be on in Perth during one of my breaks. This was 2003, when there were the first stirrings of a recovery in the hard-rock mining sector.
As I sat through the sessions of this diamond conference, it reminded me just how captivated I was by diamond geology, and I found myself longing to get involved in the industry again.
After the conference, I went on the associated field trip. This excursion was to the Kimberley region in the north of Western Australia. The Kimberley has a rugged and pristine tropical coastline with an undeveloped, remote interior. The area hosts the only two operating diamond mines in Australia: Ellendale and Argyle, both of which we were to visit.
The diamond-bearing material at Ellendale and Argyle is an unusual rock called lamproite (similar to kimberlite), which formed deep in the earth’s mantle (greater than 150 kilometres), where pressures are so high that the natural state (allotrope) of carbon is diamond.
Millions of years ago, from these great depths, the lamproite magma (semi-liquid rock), with its entrained diamonds, moved upwards. It travelled along deep crustal fractures to eventually erupt and form a series of pipe-like bodies. The diamonds within these pipes then waited for some lucky geologist to come along and find them.
First up on our visit was the Ellendale Diamond Mine. We flew in to the mine site by light aircraft from Broome. The air was hot and humid and we were buffeted by turbulence all the way. Just as I thought I would be seeing my breakfast again, we landed. As we got off the plane, we were greeted by burning sun, drenching humidity and the haze of wood-smoke from various bushfires in the surrounding arid scrub.
We toured the mine in a bus, hopping off to look at the impressively large open pit and various exploration trenches searching for more lamproite or associated gravels with alluvial diamonds. After this we were chaperoned into the diamond recovery area next to the ore processing plant.
Two women were using tweezers to pick diamonds from the final concentrate (this is the end material produced from treating the ore). We looked on, mouths agape. From among the non-descript angular rocks of the concentrate, the women were regularly picking out dazzling, large, clear, yellow diamonds.
The largest was a glorious 4-carat, flawless, yellow stone – that really got the blood going. Of particular interest was that most of the stones appeared to have the same colour and clarity, which is extremely important for making matching jewellery.
The atmosphere among the group was charged by this close encounter with some of the finest diamonds in the world, and the talk was lively as we returned to the mess for some tea.
Some of the geologists on the tour had worked on the original discovery at Ellendale and, together with the current site geologists, talked knowledgeably about the geology of the mine. As I listened, I was struck by how little exploration work had been done on the outlying areas, and I felt there may still be an opportunity to find a new diamond-bearing pipe away from the main Ellendale mining cluster.
When I got back to Perth I would need to go to the Mines Department and check the ground position around Ellendale to see if any area was available to peg.
The following day we flew to the Argyle Diamond Mine, in the East Kimberley. Argyle was for some years the world’s largest producer of diamonds (by weight, not value), with over 50 million carats (10 tonnes!) mined per year. Most of these diamonds were of poor quality, but among such a bounty there were a number of good stones.
What really defines Argyle diamonds is a tiny subset of remarkable, rare and extremely valuable stones: the fabled Argyle Pinks. The most exceptional of these pink diamonds are literally one diamond in a million. Although pink diamonds are (rarely) found elsewhere, at Argyle the pink colour can be the most intense and thus valuable.
The field trip to Argyle was inspiring, especially because also present were a number of well-known diamond geologists. This included Ewan Tyler who had been one of the managers of the program that in 1979 had discovered the Argyle mine. I had also previously met geologist Maureen Muggeridge who had taken the samples in Smoke Creek that had led to the discovery.
Follow-up work upstream from these samples led geologists to a remote valley in which lay the Argyle diatreme itself, recognisable as outcropping lamproite. Incredibly, diamonds could be seen in the overlying termite mounds. To see actual diamonds was extremely unlikely, and led the geologists to believe that the grade of the lamproite must be exceptional. It was, at 6.8 carats per tonne. Argyle subsequently became the highest-grade diamond mine in the world.
At the time, keeping the discovery secret was paramount. There was an agonising wait of two months whilst existing tenements over the area, held by the uranium company Uranerz, were left to expire. When they did, in late October 1979, mining company CRAE (now Rio Tinto Exploration) pegged the Argyle leases and secured the great prize
This was what made mineral exploration so thrilling: discoveries like Argyle that originated from a few creek samples.
We had lunch in the well-appointed mess at Argyle and were shown some of the diamonds by the mine manager. They had a slight metallic lustre, which was characteristic of Argyle stones.
The manager explained that the week before they had found numerous small shards of pink diamonds; these were the result of a single pink diamond – estimated at 4 carats and worth many millions of dollars – being destroyed by the crusher. It was always an economic balancing act as to how fine to crush the ore: too coarse and you would not liberate the numerous smaller diamonds; too fine and you would crush the largest and best stones.
When I got back to Perth, suitably inspired, I went to the Mines Department to look at the ground position around Ellendale. I was pleasantly surprised to see some vacant ground, just south of the known pipes. This was ground that no one currently held under any type of mining lease, and so it was available to be pegged by any individual or company, provided you could prove you had the means to explore the ground. My technical background helped with this latter requirement.
I checked the geological maps and noticed that the area was under transported cover (sand). This sand would hide any (older) diamond-bearing pipes. This was a bonus because if the lamproite pipes stuck out of the ground, they most likely would have been found already.
This was what my hard-earned money was for. It was now or never. With the assistance of a Mines Department officer, I pegged the available ground. Pegging used to be done by driving wooden stakes into the ground; these days it is achieved rather less romantically by computer. I put the two tenements in the name of my existing 100 per cent–owned private company, Ozwest Holdings Pty Ltd (Ozwest), which I used for the oil consulting jobs. The cost was around A$17,000. I would not have been able to afford this without the good money flowing in from the rig work, so that decision was starting to pay dividends.
I now had exclusive mineral rights over an area of around 300 square kilometres. More importantly, I also had a decent geological concept for discovering a new diamond mine within that area. It was not a bad start.
I now used every break from my work in Pakistan to try and advance my diamond interests in some way. Through this discipline, I regained my focus. The business nitty-gritty of raising money and floating Ozwest would hopefully fall into place if I kept trying.