John Raymond Brett

John Raymond Brett died September 11, 2020. He was born at South Kensington, London, on January 15, 1938. He attended University of Sheffield, studying mining, graduating with first-class honors. He quickly moved up through the ranks from trainee surveyor to underground manager in South Africa. In 1967, he moved back to England to take up a mine manager’s role in tin mining in Cornwall. After a relatively short period, an opportunity at Rosebery in Tasmania lured him to Australia. In 1972, he joined the Utah Development Co. (UDC), local offshoot of Utah International Inc. (UII), in Queensland’s Bowen Basin. He became Chief mining engineer and development manager for their Australian Operations. His feasibility work on the introduction of a large bucket wheel excavator for the overburden stripping at Goonyella mine was truly seminal. Toward the end of his career, he took over the general manager role at the newly constructed Mount Owen mine in the Hunter Valley that BHP, who had taken over the worldwide assets of UII in 1984, including those of UDC in Australia, had constructed in 1995-1996. When the research organization ACARP was formed in 1992, he became the inaugural chairman of its Open-Cut Committee. Upon retiring from executive life in 2001, he set up his own consultancy and translated his support for ACARP by taking the role of open-cut research coordinator, a position he held for 15 years until 2016. In so doing he completed more than 23 years of highly active leadership in open-cut research within the ACARP research organization, contributing in a major way to the world leadership that Australia enjoys in the area of mechanized open-cut operations. He joined the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (AusIMM) in July 1971, as a fellow. He was highly active at the branch level in Brisbane, and, ultimately, became a councilor of the institute in 1986 for approximately 10 years.