The title of my presentation is `Nursing One's Resources', words
that fit a young organisation like Ross Mining and words we had
to apply to reach our current level as a company. To get to where we are, we had to nurse, foster and treat
carefully all our available resources in the widest sense of the
word, namely: a stock or supply that can be drawn upon (funds, mineral
resources, human resources); the means available to achieve an end;
skills in devising expedients; and practical ingenuity. I do not claim that Ross Mining is now the perfect mining
company. However, we have become a profitable, dividend- paying, gold mining and exploration company which is to our
knowledge, currently the cheapest gold producer on the
Australian continent. Nursing our resources got us where we are
and will guide us in our future development. The words `nursing one's resources' are I feel particularly
applicable to mining-as I like to argue that the extractive mining
industry has a social responsibility to optimise the metal output
and value from each orebody which is being exploited, and
preferably leave no metal behind. Likewise, a modem company
cannot survive into the future without maximising and optimising
its human resource potential. In this presentation I would like to present a number of actual
examples of nursing one's physical and human resources. Before
I do that, I will give a brief background to Ross Mining. Ross Mining NL is a young Queensland-based company that
gained its stock exchange listing in September 1987 and that
poured its first gold in 1989 from its own developed Belyando
Mine, located in Central Queensland. We have now reached the
stage of a medium-size gold producer, producing approximately
70 000 ounces of gold per year, mainly from the Yandan Gold
Mine, also in Central Queensland. Our production is set to
increase to over 100 000 ounces in the near future. Recent
increases in our resource base have secured us a future of ten to
15 years. As a young, newly listed company, we faced all the dangers
that most new small floats do as a new entrant into an established
industry. However, one advantage of being young and perhaps
naive, is summed up by the following Zen Buddist saying: In the beginner's mind there are many
possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few. A mining company's main assets are the sum of its resource
base and the skills and talents of its people. Attempting to
optimise both the physical and human resources within the
company has been to-date the key to our success. The first example I would like to present is linked to the
exploitation of the Belyando Gold Mine in Central Queensland.