You have praised the advantages of freedom and said you excel at being wrong. How have these traits helped you become perhaps the most successful mining explorationist ever?
Mineral exploration is all about risk-taking: from the risk that commodity prices will fall to the risk that taxes will rise and many things between. Also, there’s the risk that, for some unrecognized geologic reason, the ore deposit model just didn’t work this time, or that for a few years global mining finance has dried up. There are a jumble of risks, and you can do one of two things: either take no risks and probably never in your career find a new mine, or you can try to play the odds and if you think there is one chance out of 10 that a new drill hole will find a new mine, you drill 10 holes and be wrong nine times and be a hero the 10th.

Which are the most important qualities necessary for a successful mine explorer?
I think experience is of more value than education. It also helps to know something about geology, but it may sometimes help more to know a lot about mines because the definition of “ore” is “rock that can be mined at a profit”. An explorationist should also know a bit about business and understand mineral economics. He should be optimistic, very hard-working and dedicated to finding an orebody. He should be a maverick willing to ignore dogmas. He should also be honest and truthful.

You’ve stated that new technologies have played a “very small” role in mine discoveries over your lifetime, yet mining companies are constantly looking to use new technologies to discover mines. Why is that?
Quite a bit of mining exploration technology has been borrowed from the oil industry, where 10,000-metre-deep offshore drill holes cost several billion dollars and are based on the very sophisticated technology necessary to find the target and design the drilling equipment. Their reward as well as their cost is an order of magnitude higher than in the mining industry. Hitting a big oilfield is like hitting the haystack and hitting a deep orebody is like hitting the needle in the haystack. “Broad-brush” oil technology doesn’t work well in mineral exploration. I have always felt that mining companies want to use geophysics to find orebodies, but they also have other motives. In a time of exploding technology there is pressure to tell your shareholders that you are using the cutting edge of technology. I have found that the simplest and cheapest common geophysical survey, the magnetometer survey, is also the most useful and reliable when used to map the underground contacts of relatively magnetic rocks like granite in contact with low magnetic susceptibility rocks like limestone.

Do you consider yourself a maverick, and if so, why?
I am an unrepentant maverick. Almost every square metre of the world’s rock outcrop has been looked at: first by indigenous tribesmen, then by the Romans, then by medieval people who wrote the beautifully illustrated De Re Metallica in 1556, then the Cornishmen from England in the 1800s, then Daniel Jackling looking for large low-grade mines in the early 1900s, and finally the people furnishing commodities for the later explosive growth of civilization. I assume that every obvious orebody would have been found 10, 100, 500 or 2,000 years ago by some diligent, hard-working explorationist of the time using the current dogma. When looking for new mines I assumed none of the classic dogmas had worked, so I tried to ignore them and consciously tried to come up with a new explanation for why an orebody might be present that didn’t fit the dogmas. It’s fun being a maverick.