Hugh Smithies: GSWA - Pioneering digital geological mapping

Hugh Smithies talks about starting out with the Geological Survey of Western Australia, and seeing the transition over the years from pre-GPS days to modern digital geological mapping 

Transcript

00:01 Hugh

I was given my survey survival kit, which was a pair of steel-capped boots, a pair of overalls, one army ration pack and a pen knife.

00:12 Julie

Welcome to The Rocks Beneath Our Feet. In this series, five geologists talk about their years devoted to working for the Geological Survey of Western Australia. From understanding early life on earth, to resolving the tectonic processes that shaped our planet, using the chemistry of soils, sands, and rocks, and following the trail of new technologies, to make the maps that unearth our understanding of Western Australia’s geology. Through their personal stories of challenges faced and lessons learned, they reveal their shared passion for discovering the stories in the rocks beneath our feet.

I’m Julie Hollis.

In this episode, Hugh Smithies talks about starting out with the Geological Survey of Western Australia, and seeing the transition over the years from pre-GPS days to modern digital geological mapping.

00:49 Julie

If you could just start by introducing yourself

00:53 Hugh

Well, my name's Hugh Smithes. I'm, I've worked for the Geological Survey of Western Australia have done just about all of my working career. I’ve lived in Perth ever since I started working for the survey. I'm basically, I guess a geochemist by, by love. And a regional mapper as well by love again, I guess. 

I graduated with honours at the Australian National University a considerable time ago during a mining recession. And, I guess at that stage I was certainly keen to keep on in geology and keep on studying. So I actually went off to South Africa for five years and did, did an MSc and a PhD I managed, I guess graduating with my PhD, I managed to coincide that with the next recession in earth science.

01:42 Julie

That was good timing.

01:43 Hugh

Yeah. I spent a year in Canberra at that stage at the Bureau of Mineral Resources. When, when a job was advertised in the Geological Survey of Western Australia, I applied for it, and, and I guess the rest is history. That's where I've been ever since. I joined the Geological Survey in 1992, I think, pretty close to my 30th birthday.  Yeah, and been there ever since and loved just about every minute of it.

I guess the process was back then, that whenever a young geologist joined the geological survey, you were condemned to a year mapping in the, the 100,000 sheet remaining in the Yilgarn that had the least amount of outcrop, and was furthest away from Kalgoorlie, and hardest to get to. And you were sent out there by yourself to map in one season and 2500 square kilometres of dirt. So I guess those that remained after that year were deemed okay.

So yeah, that’s how I spent my first year. I arrived in Perth, shown the hotel where I'd be staying for the next five days, taken out to Carlisle, where our vehicle pool was, shown the four-wheel drive that was allocated to me, the assumption obviously being made that I knew how to drive a four-wheel drive. Then I spent the next four days in Perth in Mineral House, meeting the guys, gathering together what information and equipment I needed to go out mapping, shown where I'd be mapping, which in this case was a hundred and twenty kilometres on the other side of Kalgoorlie, shown on a map where Kalgoorlie indeed was, then sent out to Carlisle again to be trained in how to change tyres, how to do rudimentary maintenance on the four wheel drives, how to use the HF radios, given my survey survival kit, which was a pair of steel capped-boots, a pair of overalls, one army ration pack and a pen knife.

And given a caravan in fact, and then basically pointed in the direction of Kalgoorlie and that was it. Yeah, I spent the next day driving up to Kalgoorlie and parked my caravan in Kalgoorlie, met the guys in the Kalgoorlie regional office. And at that stage that was, that was Cees Swagger,

03:58 Julie

Oh, right.

03:59 Hugh

Stephen Wyche and Tony Ahmat, back then. And they pointed me in the direction of the Roe hundred thousand sheet, where I was mapping, and that was it. I was sent off into, into the wilderness.

04:09 Julie

God

04:10 Hugh

Totally green, scared out of my wits about being by myself for more than 20 seconds in the bush.

04:17 Julie

Did you have a field assistant?

04:19 Hugh

No. These were the days when, yeah, well pre Oc-Health and Safety.

04:26 Julie

Yeah, clearly.

04:27 Hugh

Yeah, so it was just me out there for I guess two weeks at a time. I'd come back to Kalgoorlie every two or three weeks, have a night in the caravan park and, and resupply and go back out. But yeah, it was just me. I'd never used a swag before in my life. I was reasonably comfortable with locating myself on a, on an aerial photograph. But I guess what you’ve got to bear in mind about the goldfields is there’s absolutely no topography and I was totally unprepared for that.

04:53 Julie

Yeah.

04:54 Hugh

You know, aerial photographs are all well and good if you've got reference points, but out in the Kalgoorlie, there are none. So, you learn pretty quick how to read what little you can get out of an aerial photograph.  But when there's no topography, you may as well turn them over and try and navigate on the blank side.

It was quite daunting and I must admit there were some times when I was quite concerned about my capacity to find my way back to the vehicle. I used to sort of walk down a track, then do a traverse and come back and hope that, you know, make the assumption that if you found your track you knew which side of the vehicle you were on. If you didn't find your tracks you’d either gone way off, which is, you know you’re in trouble then anyway, or you were on the other on side of the vehicle. Yeah, lucky enough not to have got too far off track.

05:43 Julie

Yeah, that’s good.

05:46 Hugh

It’s quite, quite scary. Yeah, you know, we didn't have GPSes at that stage. So it was all referencing to the six digit grid references on topo maps,

05:55 Julie

Yep.

05:56 Hugh

Trying to recognize on the topo maps where you were on the aerial photographs. Yeah, so the very few fence lines and tracks were your main reference points.

06:05 Julie

Yeah.

06:06 Hugh

Some people do have the knack, even with very few reference points, just intuitively knowing where they are. I wasn't one of those and I can remember, when I first started mapping, having arguments about where the hell on the map we are and I was usually more wrong than right. Yeah, it’s interesting isn’t it that some people just have that intuitive ability.

06:26 Julie

Yep. But it’s not really required anymore, generally.

06:29 Hugh

As long as the technology works we’re a lot safer now, aren’t we?

06:32 Julie

Yeah, that’s right.

06:33 Hugh

So the first GPS I ever saw was in fact Tony Ahmat brought it out into my field area. And, you know, this was heralded as the next quantum leap in mapping. Except it came out in this big bloody suitcase. You know, how the hell I was going to lug this across the field because you know, just certainly beyond me. And he got this thing out and plugged the battery in. And we waited half an hour for it to pick up satellites and then half an hour for it to resolve and then, then it gave a coordinate which may or may not have agreed with where we thought we were.

That was the first GPS. But they evolved amazingly quickly after that because I think the next year was my first year in the Rudall. And we mapped that year again without GPSes, but the second year we had, we used to call them the bananas because they were this this bent yellow, I think it was a Trimble.

07:27 Julie

Oh yeah.

07:28 Hugh

Just looked like a banana. And that was the first vehicle mounted GPS. And you could take off. It was handheld as well.

07:35 Julie

Right.

07:36 Hugh

And that was when, I think it was referred to as selective availability, when not all of the satellites were available for commercial GPS or recreational GPS use.

07:45 Julie

Right.

07:45 Hugh

So they weren't all that accurate. There was a lot of drift. We used to set this thing on the dashboard and sit in the cab and eat our lunch and just watch the coordinates drift north and south and east and west. And they were drifting a kilometre.

07:58 Julie

Wow.

07:58 Hugh

Yeah, I guess you think well hell, I may as well get my aerial photograph out and use that.  And then I guess a few years later the Americans made all of the channels available and all of a sudden, you know, we were getting metre scale accuracy. That was so was the real turning point, I think.

08:14 Julie

Yeah. So you weren’t too put off by that first year then?

08:18 Hugh

No, no I wasn’t. And you learn to really love the bush quite quickly. Well, if you don't learn to love the bush quite quickly, I guess you're in the wrong job. I think once you do become reasonably acclimatized to the bush and comfortable in the bush and happy with your own company, you know, your love of geology really kicks in and starts to override everything else.

08:35 Julie

Yeah.

08:36 Hugh

Certainly that happened reasonably quickly. Yeah, you get to really appreciate being out there and really appreciate the challenge of regional mapping because it really, you know, in all of the types of geology that I've done, the most challenging aspect of my career, and rewarding in fact, has always been the regional mapping.

08:53 Julie

Yeah.

08:54 Hugh

It's just a love seeing a pattern develop in front of your eyes.

08:58 Julie

Yeah.

08:58 Hugh

And the challenge of understanding why that pattern is like that. Yeah it's addictive.

09:02 Julie

Yeah. Sounds like you picked the right job.

09:05 Hugh

Yeah. The Rudall was one of these absolutely beautiful places. First time I'd ever been in, in fair dinkum desert. 

09:13 Julie

Yeah.

09:14 Hugh

And if you've ever been to the to the Rudall River National Park,

09:16 Julie

Renamed in 2008 to Karlamilyi National Park, to acknowledge the Aboriginal traditional owners of that country.

09:24 Hugh

it’s just an absolutely glorious piece of desert as well. If I hadn't, if I hadn't become addicted to field work in the goldfields, then I certainly did become addicted in the Rudall. You know, just the campfires in the night, the stars, the sleeping out in the swags, for seven weeks on end. It was glorious. The camels, lots of camels in the Rudall.

09:45 Julie

Oh right.

09:46 Hugh

There were herds of, oh there must have been thousands and thousands of head of camel in these herds. And we used to time our lunch break by you find a herd. The beginning of a herd you set up for lunch and by the time the last camel comes through, you know your lunch is over and you pack up and leave. Yeah, that was typically about half an hour. These cattle herds were so long.

10:06 Julie

Wow.

10:07 Hugh

You certainly learn how to look after yourself in the bush. You learn how to become very proficient at four-wheel driving. You pick up a lot of bush skills. You end up very, very quickly becoming very, very at home in the bush.

10:18 Julie

Yep.

10:19 Hugh

Maybe too much so.

10:20 Julie

In The mid 2000s, Hugh started working in the Musgrave Province in central Australia.

10:26 Hugh

The Musgrave project probably represented to the Geological Survey the last full on campaign-style mapping project. These were some of the last hundred thousand scale sheets that the Survey produced as a large block. It's also where the, sort of, conversion from the old style of mapping and compilation to the digital world became complete. We delved into digital data collection in the field with our Warox data set in the Pilbara, but in the Musgraves, that's where we started to perfect the use of tablets not just for data collection, but for navigation, for allowing us the capacity to have all of the required remotely sensed data out there with us.

11:11 Julie

Yeah.

11:12 Hugh

And being able to place ourselves on the screen using an inbuilt GPS that we could carry on traverse, so we could actually see where we were moving with respect to both the topography, the known geology, all of the remotely-sensed layers. It was just a totally new world for us.

11:29 Julie

Yeah.

11:30 Hugh

Heather Howard was pushing the use of tablets at that stage. And certainly each new field season we were guinea pigs to some extent because we seemed to be going out with an absolutely different brand of tablet.

Paul Evins, quite a brilliant and quite an eccentric geologist that was with us for I think four or five years. He was right into testing out the new technologies. And I think it was actually a couple of days out with him that really changed my perspective. We were about to go into a heavily duned area. We knew there was a bit of outcrop in there that was important to get to see. But it was heavily duned. And some of the Musgraves sand dunes, you know they're not trivial. And even when you've almost flattened your tires and you get a bit of a run up, sometimes you just cannot get up these things. The topo maps weren't good enough to allow us to navigate.

So I just looked at Paul, it was Paul and I traveling in the same vehicle. And I said, well, you know, “How the hell we going to do this?” And he just got his tablet out and plugged the GPS in and basically looked at me as if, you know, take a look at this dinosaur. This is how you do it. And he showed me the screen. And he’d downloaded the digital elevation model. And he said, “Right, that dot is us. Drive.” And as we drove, yeah, I could see it moving and he'd say, “Right, you know, go up this corridor, then over there. That's the low point. Around that, around that, round that there, that dune. Follow it for a kilometre.” And I just thought, “Geez. How good’s this?” And, and that was it. It was that event then that really sold me. 

13:05 Julie

It’s like having Google Maps in the bush.

13:08 Hugh

Yeah, and this is way before that. You know, the fact that you could actually overlay the geology on that as well was, you know, sort of, overlooked by me at that stage. It was just the convenience of navigation. So everything else after that was a bonus.

A couple of years after that we were at the stage where we'd settled on a particular tablet platform. It had the capacity to run a full version of ArcGis at that stage. We could get all of our image, imagery on, on there. It had a, had an inbuilt GPS that was reliable. And we could put Warox, our database on there. We go actually populate it out in the field, take our structural measurements, all of our observations. And we could actually start compiling then in there on outcrop, if needed. 

13:47 Julie

Yep.

13:48 Hugh

We could actually start making our map out as we went with all of the accuracy and meticulous sort of scrutiny that, in terms of the, the remote sensing that would otherwise have done back in the office. We could do it there and then and go back in the evening and sit around the fire and compare screens. And these things were rugged. We could drop them. We could use them as a cheese board, if you like. I think some people did. They were rugged enough that all but an unnamed few, few in the Survey could – he knows who he is – could actually go out without breaking one every season. 

That's where the revolution in the way the Survey mapped. That's how we ended up in the digital world. You know, I don't think we've really changed all that much since then in terms of the way we go about mapping, collecting our data in the field. The Geological Survey Western Australia prides itself is as a real pioneering organization in terms of digital geological mapping. I think that's quite a legitimate claim.

14:45 Julie

You’ve been listening to The Rocks Beneath Our Feet. I’m Julie Hollis.