As a teenager Dave Ransom was inspired by a book to become a geologist before he understood he had a rare gift that would help make him a highly respected name in the field, and others. And that he had the profession’s superpower. “You can just be lucky,” he said in September. “That's the thing in geology.”

Posthumously recognised as a Legend in Mining at IMARC 2024 in Sydney, Ransom said in an interview shortly before he died that he was fortunate to meet and work with “a lot of smart people” in mineral exploration and mining finance in a career spanning more than 60 years.

Many have returned the accolade.

Ransom said he read Charles F. Laseron’s Ancient Australia when he was home sick from school in his teens.

“It was the story of the changing geography and life of Australia from the beginning of geological time to the present.

“I was so inspired by it I decided I wanted to be a geologist. 

“I was also very good at geometry. I could see things in three dimensions pretty easily without the aid of a computer. So I had an advantage.

“It’s actually a rare gift which allowed me to make prognostications about things in three dimensions fairly easily.

“I became very interested in the geology and the geological part was pretty thin on the ground in those days. Australia was wide open to new geological thought.”

Ransom said a school headmaster told him there were plenty of government jobs. Wasn’t it ridiculous to be thinking about being a geologist?

“He was right, except this was the start of [a] mining boom, which he couldn't predict.

“And I was lucky enough to hang onto the coat tails of the nickel boom and follow the massive growth of the industry over a period of 60 years and prosper with it.”

Ransom got his geology degree, with honours, at the University of Sydney and spent time under revered structural geologist Bruce Hobbs’ tutelage at Broken Hill in New South Wales while doing his structural geology PhD with the Australian National University.

He worked as a project geologist with Aberfoyle in Australia and then Cominco in Canada.

After early exposure to Archaean greenstone terrane in Western Australia, Ransom found himself involved in a review of Cominco’s Yellowknife ground around the historically significant Con mine in Canada’s Northwest Territories.

“Gold prices started to run and I looked at the structure for the first time in about 40 years,” he said.

A prominent geo’s notes on intersecting fault structures and movements made for “really interesting” reading.

“It was interesting to go through it because his very detailed notes were different to what he proposed. It's a different way to what I do, which is more observational,” Ransom said.

“He actually predicted the position of a large orebody just to the east, which replaced the Con mine and gave Cominco a large gold producer in Yellowknife. 

“[But] he sort of fudged it. He got the right answer probably for the wrong reason.”

Ransom said he worked for different companies in senior geologist-type roles for about 10 years before figuring out “I wasn't cut out for management”. He turned to consulting in the late 1970s.

“I was essentially talked into it by Tim Hopwood, who was a fairly prominent structural geologist in Australia. And that launched me on [my] consulting career which went for 20 years.”

He worked on many projects for a lot of companies, among them BHP, Rio Tinto, Newmont and Newcrest Mining. A period focused on the giant Mount Newman iron ore mine in WA’s Pilbara region stood out in his memory. “BHP had a geological interpretation for the south wall at Mount Newman which had lasted 25 years and then broke down. Myself and a bunch of people from one of the rock mechanics teams reinterpreted the whole structure, which is 19km in length, and completely changed the way in which the pit was designed.”

He remembered going back to the Boulder-Lefroy shear zone for Newmont Australia (which became Newcrest and then Newmont again) which had New Celebration and a huge land package along the highway between Kalgoorlie and Kambalda. “I did a fair bit of work for them. One interesting one was working on the geology of those mines south of Kalgoorlie … where I felt I made a contribution to the understanding of how the ores were distributed.

“My gift was structural geology and the ability to visualise the data in 3D in my head. It was the visualisation with the data interpretation that was my specialty and I understood the latest ideas pretty well. 

“I think that mineral deposits don’t follow particular rules. They follow the same rules of formation but it’s incredibly difficult to model them with just geophysics or geochemistry or AI.

“I remember writing a compendium at CRA years ago about the shapes of massive sulphide deposits. And I came up with, I think, a couple of hundred of these deposits. None of them look the same. They're all different. And that's why I have this view about AI use in exploration.

“It's backward-looking.

“It can't predict anything.

“If you educate a computer about a certain type of orebody with a particular shape and geometry, you’ll never find another one. 

“They’re all like snowflakes.

“I was more an empiricist.”

One of Ransom’s other gifts was humility.

“Dave is revered throughout the resources industry for his geological knowledge, his project knowledge and his vast experience and ability to identify the star projects and also the donuts,” leaders of the Sydney Mineral Exploration Discussion Group (SMEDG) said.

Ransom would have smiled at that.

He said when recently receiving the James Dines Hall of Fame award he was “very flattered to receive the honour since there are many of my colleagues who would be equally or more deserving”.

“I represent the cohort of geologists and engineers who joined the Australian resource industry in the nickel boom of the 60s and who have benefited by riding on the coat tails of the massive growth in the Australian resource and energy industry over the past 60 years.”

Ransom said he knew “nothing about high finance” but he also enjoyed success in his career on Melbourne’s Collins Street with Acorn Capital.

“[Acorn founder] Barry Fairley took a big punt and employed me as an analyst, working in microcaps, which were defined at the time as companies having a market cap of less than $500 million Aussie.

“There were approximately 600 companies which had no analyst coverage at all.

“So I just started working and, not to put too fine a point on it, I’m completely innumerate and know nothing about high finance. My strength is technical. And the interesting thing is that a large number of these companies had, as Barry put it, no financial policies.

“So you didn't really need to know about the finances.

“The more important thing was to make judgments about the technical results they churned out.

“My consulting career had set me up for that very job, really, because I’d worked on 100-odd projects in the past all over Australia [and] a lot overseas.

“I knew a lot of the people.

“I knew where a lot of the bodies were buried.

“I was good at structural geology, with the ability to visualise the structures in 3D in my mind, so I was uniquely qualified for that job.

“That’s the reason, basically, why I was successful.”

Oft-maligned juniors were “important because they’re part of the ecology” of the industry, Ransom said.

“I think if you looked at it coldly you'd probably find that the discoveries would be in favour of the big companies in large part,” he said.

“However, the juniors act very quickly. They can react and move much faster than the big companies can. They don't have centralised managements. They tend to be entrepreneurial in the way they go about things. And I think they're an important part of the whole mining scheme.

“Usually there are waves of them. They grow big, get taken over and, generally speaking, there’ll be another cohort that'll come along that replaces the guys who get taken out at the top of the market.”

Ransom acknowledged the line that exploration itself was evolving and significant discoveries were generally getting deeper and, maybe, more complex.

“I think that deep exploration is not a game for the juniors,” he said. “It's too risky. In fact, the risks are enormous. And despite the claims by our geophysical colleagues very few of them actually result in discoveries. 

“My view is that if you're a small company, to blow up a million dollars on a kilometre-long drill hole is just a waste of money. Chances of success are minimal. And you'll have to come back to the market and tell them about your shitty results and your share price will fall.

“So basically I think it's a game for the big companies. 

“I think there’s too much reliance on very arcane geophysics. And geophysicists, frankly, have very little understanding of what rocks look like, what their shapes are, what they can and can't be.

“That's not to say that there are not brilliant people working in the field. There are. And there are certainly exceptions. But notwithstanding all of that the results to date for the millions of dollars in deep, high-risk exploration are not particularly impressive.

“If you want to drill deep holes you’ve got to be around other places where that type of orebody occurs.”

Vale Dr David Ransom: 28/7/1944 - 29/9/2024