James Thompson

It's one of those things I've been writing about it and talking about it for the best part of 25 years and hadn't been there.

So when Rio Tinto said they could take us up to their Western Range mine, which is only like 18 months old-

A group of us from the AFR jumped at the chance.

We caught the plane early on Monday morning up to a place called Parabadoo, which is a town entirely invented for iron ore mining, with a plane load full of FIFO workers in their high-vis.

We got on the bus and went about 20 minutes out to the Western Range mine.

Now, the scale of these things is enormous, and that's what hits you, you know.

The mine covers a huge amount of territory.

And then you see the mining trucks are many stories high.

They carry 240 tons of iron ore at a time.

We actually got to sit in the cab of one.

The size of everything is extraordinary.

But what gets you, I think, is the automation.

Yeah.

all these trucks endlessly 24 hours driving around the mine site, they're all automated.

No one's in them.

The two kilometre long iron ore train, yes, two kilometres long, no one's driving that.

It's all controlled from a control centre back in Perth.

So the number of actual people on the mine site is fairly limited.

You know, there's lots of people doing inspections and making sure all this automation works and runs and

stays on track but um it's a fleet of robots doing a lot of the heavy lifting but it was just you know just amazing to get that sense of you know the red dust is everywhere you cannot lean on a on a fence without getting covered in red dust and the conditions are harsh even that idea of flying into work a couple of hours there a couple of hours back