Published in the June 2011 Australian Longwall Magazine

Brett has more than 10 years experience in the coal mine scene in both Queensland and NSW, including AngloCoal’s Moranbah North and Dartbrooks mines, Xstrata’s Tahmoor mine as well as NRE No 1. He is a qualified deputy, undermanager, ventilation officer and mine manager.

When not underground he likes playing golf in the nearby Southern Highlands and spending time with the family and kids.

Q. What is your earliest mining memory?

I still remember going down the shaft in the cage at Westcliff when I was 6 years old at an open day at the mine. I remember it being a very different and exciting world. My sister who was only 4 came as well and my mother had to carry her cap lamp for her.

Q. What made you choose mining as a career?

Both my parents were exploration geologists and I grew up with plenty of mining talk around the dinner table. When I finished my schooling and realised a rugby career was never going to happen, I looked into mining engineering which seemed to offer good pay and a chance to see some of the world.

Q. What was your favourite job in a coal mine?

I’ve held a few different roles but I always really enjoyed being a longwall deputy. No two shifts were ever the same and it was a great challenge chasing daily targets and working to get the best out of the crew and the longwall.

The role I have at the moment is to help re-establish one of Australia’s oldest and historically highest producing mines, NRE No 1 (South Bulli), back into longwall production.

This is providing some interesting challenges and has been a very rewarding experience.

Q. What was your least favourite job?

Looking at a longwall face full of rock when the AFC can’t pull away and swinging a sledgehammer for a 12 hour night shift was always pretty hard to get excited about.

Q. Who, or what, has most influenced your mining career?

I’ve been fortunate to meet some great people in the mining industry who have all offered good advice and guidance along the way including Tony Longmate, Gavin Taylor, Neville McAlary, Bruce Allan and too many others to name.

Q. What do you consider your best mining achievement?

Being part of the NRE team redevelopingtwo older mines back to high producingones has been a great experience and hard work.

The achievement will hopefully be to provide the South Coast with two great mines again.

Q. What do you see as being the greatest mining development during your career?

Although hopefully I’ve still got a way to go in my career, the greater horsepower and face widths/lengths on longwalls is very quickly increasing the tonnage rates from longwall faces.

This is putting a lot of pressure on all the supporting services (ventilation, coal clearance, development, gas drainage etc) and I think that will be where the effort needs to be focused in the coming years.

Q. Do you hold any mining records?

I was the longwall superintendent at Tahmoor when we broke the daily production record although they tell me now it’s since been broken.

Q. Do you have any unfulfilled ambitions?

The golf game continues to go backwards and I would like to address this slide.

Q. What was your most embarrassing moment in a coal mine?

Flitting a Cram multibolter some years ago I managed to pickup and damage a continuous miner cable hanging from the roof on a drill mast. I had to sit through an investigation with the deputy asking why I hadn’t noticed a cable was half a metre away from my head for 50 metres or so.

Q. What was your scariest time in a coal mine?

I still remember taking gas bag samples 200 metres or so behind the longwall face by myself and it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. The next second the weight came on, a couple of bolts snapped, clouds of stone dust and it felt like it took several minutes for my heart rate to start slowing down.

Q. What is your worst memory of coal mining?

Thankfully I haven’t worked at a mine when a fatality has taken place. I’d like to hope the industry can get to the point when serious injuries are a thing of the past.

Q. Do you think that the day of the fully automated remotely operated face is near?

The rapid improvement in automation continues to gather speed and new longwalls can already cover most of their cycles in auto mode.

I think the missing link has always been the geological/geotechnical variation and with continual development of online geotechnical tools like LVA [Longwall Visual Analysis], it won’t be far away.

Q. What major improvements would you like to see on longwall operations?

There continues to be incidents with people on the face around moving chocks. The movement towards proximity detection and remote operations will hopefully reduce the number of these incidents.