INSIDER MAGAZINE: With a rich resources heritage in his blood, Ken Brinsden is building his own lasting legacy

Ken Brinsden’s family links to mining run deeper than the rich gold lodes that have supported Kalgoorlie-Boulder for more than a century.

The former Atlas Iron and Pilbara Minerals boss, now chairman of Canadian lithium play Patriot Battery Metals, has mining in his DNA.

On father Michael’s side of the family, both Ken’s grandfather, another Ken, and great-grandfather Fred managed mines and processing plants on the Golden Mile, while heading up the major WA industry bodies of the day.

Fred, a prominent boss of the big South Kalgurli gold mine in the first half of the century, was a long-term president of the WA Chamber of Mines.His son was manager of the Croseus treatment plant on the Mile and presiding over a meeting of the Goldfields branch of the Australian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy when he died of a heart attack aged just 39 in 1952.

On mother Noelle’s side, Brinsden’s grandfather Eddie Johns, who was born in Kalgoorlie when it was still a tent city, was a lecturer at the gold centre’s WA School of Mines for decades.

For all his mining ties, however, the younger Brinsden’s entry into the industry wasn’t straightforward. His parents — Michael was an electrical engineer and Noelle became a librarian and music teacher after winning awards as a celebrated junior pianist — travelled the world on graduation from university in Perth and eventually settled on the other side of the country.

Born in Sydney, Brinsden’s memories of childhood Christmas holidays are of long, hot car journeys across the Nullarbor crammed into the family car with his three sisters to visit relatives in Kalgoorlie and Perth. He wasn’t a top student at Epping Boys High School, but he did well enough to get university offers in Sydney when he finished up in 1989. However, he worried that he wouldn’t be challenged unless he moved away from home.

So he applied, and was accepted, to train as a mining engineer at Kalgoorlie’s WA School of Mines. “I’d had enough exposure to mining to have an inkling as to what it involved, but you never really fully understand what you’re getting into,” he says more than 30 years later, having helped break BHP and Rio Tinto’s hold on the WA iron ore industry and ushered in the first of a new generation of WA lithium mines.

Brinsden drove across the Nullarbor again, this time at the wheel of the “busted-ass” 1975 Mazda Capella he had restored during his final year at school, “when I was supposed to be studying”. Settling in the school’s halls of residence, along with a flame-haired geology student by the name of David Flanagan, Brinsden found he liked the Goldfields lifestyle a little too much. He admits the duo had “a lot of fun, and created a bit of havoc”.

He played drums in a band with Flanagan and Diggers & Dealers co-owner Myles Ertzen, failed subjects and lost a BHP scholarship. Flanagan, who was to recruit his mate to Atlas Iron a decade later, recalls the carousing and poor grades saw them threatened with expulsion.

But he says the school also gave him the first glimpse of Brinsden’s steadiness under pressure, an attribute that served him and his companies so well years later. “The band was practising one day and one of the flatmates got upset with the level of noise, and she started throwing things around and smashing plates, Ken just kept drumming all the way through, he just stayed cool, unflappable,” Flanagan recalls.

Brinsden credits his father with helping pull him back into line. He was also able to escape to Grandfather Johns’ back shed to study away from “the shenanigans” at college. His grades improved to the extent that when he graduated he was offered a traineeship with WMC, which was renowned as one of the country’s best mining training grounds.

“I loved my time in Kalgoorlie,” Brinsden says.“It’s such a good place to be exposed to the mining scene. WASM’s great strength was that by the time you’d finished your degree, you had been schooled in the culture of mining and the various disciplines. And, of course, you’ve also spent quite a bit of time actually working. So you’re genuinely ready to contribute.”

Brinsden’s great-grandfather Fred (FJ) Brinsden was once general manager of South Kalgurli Consolidated.
Brinsden’s first job with WMC took him underground at the huge Olympic Dam base metals mine in South Australia. A year later he was back in WA at WMC’s Kambalda nickel operations. Over the next eight years, apart from a year backpacking with now wife Fiona and friends, Brinsden was tapped for underground mine management roles in gold or nickel with WMC, Normandy Mining and Gold Fields.

In 2004, worried about being pigeonholed in underground mining and attracted by the challenge of building a mine from scratch, he headed to regional Victoria to lead development of Iluka Resources’ Douglas mineral sands mine near Hamilton. His young family — he and Fiona have three children — relished the change of scenery. “We bought a small farm, just outside of Hamilton, and Fiona was right into it,” he says. “I got home from work one day to find a yard full of cattle.”

In early 2006, Brinsden got a call from Flanagan, who was heading an iron ore junior, Atlas Iron, he had helped float two years earlier. Unlike Andrew Forrest’s fledgling Fortescue Metals Group, which was exploring a fully integrated mine, rail and port network to break BHP and Rio Tinto’s WA iron ore duopoly, Flanagan was thinking smaller.

WASM’s great strength was that by the time you’d finished your degree, you had been schooled in the culture of mining and the various disciplines.

He saw an opportunity to tap China’s growing demand for iron ore by initially developing smaller stranded deposits within trucking distance of Port Hedland. “He (Flanagan) said to me, ‘I’m looking for a mining engineer. Can you recommend anyone?’ And I said, ‘OK, well, what are you working on? And in the end, I said, ‘Well, how about me’?”

Brinsden’s decision to join Atlas as operations manager was also shaped by the signs of the emerging iron ore boom that would eventually drive an unprecedented mine expansion in WA.

“And our sense was, well, if you’re ever going to take an opportunity to be a part of that, actually, you really need to be in WA,” he says.

“So David, in his inimitable style, started doing deals and collecting ground and and we started working on the mines. It was an amazing time, an amazing experience, some of it very hard. But we built five mines in five years, and those assets have subsequently gone on to become actually really important assets in the Pilbara.”

The iron ore interloper rode the boom for all it was worth. At its height, Atlas was worth more than $3 billion and pulling in $1m a day in revenue on the back of iron ore prices that peaked at nearly $US200 ($310) a tonne in 2011. However, it all came tumbling down with the shock collapse in prices.

In early 2015, Atlas, squeezed by $US325m in debt taken on in 2012 to fund its expansion, temporarily shuttered its mines as prices plunged below $US50/t, forcing the company into the red. Prices would eventually bottom near $US35/t the following year. Forced into a painful financial restructuring that delivered lenders the control of the company, Atlas was taken over by Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting for $400m in 2018. By then, Brinsden, who had run the group for three tough years until 2015, was embarked on a new rollercoaster ride in lithium at Pilbara Minerals.

There’s no doubting that Atlas’ travails took their toll on him and Flanagan. But Brinsden says he recalls his nine years at the company with pride.

“As hard as it was, one of the things that I’m actually most proud of that is that it didn’t go into receivership,” he says. “At least we saved the furniture, put it that way. And it was horrible, but I think it could have been a lot worse.I worked with some great people who … put themselves at risk so that we could salvage some money for shareholders.I know a lot of people will find that an unsatisfactory answer. The alternative was it would have been much easier to close the doors.”

It’s easy to forget now with the buzz around lithium, but when Brinsden began as the chief executive of Pilbara Minerals, the industry was still in its infancy in Australia.

The appointment grew out of a chance conversation at the 2015 AFL grand final in Melbourne between Pilbara Minerals’ co-founder and executive director Neil Biddle and Nic Read, a veteran Perth PR spinner who has represented a string of WA resources juniors, including Atlas. Biddle mentioned he was looking for a company boss to get the Pilgangoora lithium project in the Pilbara into production. Well, Read replied, have you considered Brinsden?

For the latter, it was another chance to do what he loves best, build a mine from the ground up. “That’s the best part of the mining cycle. The building is where you get a chance to influence the delivery model, the culture that’s created around the company,” Brinsden says. “I enjoy all of that. I’m someone who prefers the building to managing a company, you want somebody else for that.”

Biddle was already seeing that with even just the rapid take-up of electric bikes in China during his frequent visits to the country, there was not going to be enough lithium to support demand unless more mines came on stream.

It was an amazing time, an amazing experience, some of it very hard. But we built five mines in five years, and those assets have subsequently gone on to become actually really important assets in the Pilbara.

Brinsden, initially sceptical, was quickly won over, influenced by the emergence of Elon Musk’s electric car maker Tesla. Pilbara Minerals started work immediately on Pilgangoora, just as “the Musk factor went through the roof,” he says. “They had just launched what is now called the Model Three, and it was virtually an instantaneous hit.”

As consumers embraced the vehicle, investor support for battery metal and lithium companies rocketed, ensuring Pilbara Minerals was one of the earliest winners from the new boom. However, just as with Atlas, the company was forced to overcome hurdles that could have pushed it to the brink.

Having brought Pilgangoora, 120km south-east of Port Hedland, into production via a $234m first stage mine at the end of 2018, Pilbara Minerals had to wind back production of its lithium concentrate because of a price slump blamed on a market oversupply and reduced demand from China.

Brinsden told the company’s annual meeting in November 2019 that its first year in production had been “both exciting and, in equal measure, difficult”, while urging investors to keep the faith. In the end, the recovery took longer than expected, with Pilbara Minerals having to renegotiate a tricky refinancing before it began to bank the benefit of higher prices.

Brinsden credits the Federal Government’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which had made money from early funding of Pilbara Minerals, with ensuring the refinancing was bedded down. “And having an arm of government as the equivalent of a cornerstone investor is such a powerful tool to create the right environment for other commercial money to come in. I know governments hate the idea of having to pick winners. But why wouldn’t you continue to pursue that model if it facilitates development in the State.”

By the time Brinsden stepped down last year, Pilbara Minerals was worth more than $6b; not bad for a company valued at little more than $200m when he joined seven years earlier. He credits a major part of the company’s success to its freedom as a newcomer and a junior to look at things differently, as Atlas did, rather than through the often fixed mindset of the big miners.

When he left Pilbara, there was no financial need to return to the industry, thanks to stock held by himself and Fiona potentially worth more than $40m. After a break though, Brindsen was lured back with the chairmanship of Patriot, which is sitting on promising lithium project in Canada’s James Bay district. Some 30 years after his WASM days, he’s as excited as ever by what modern-day mining can deliver to a world needing minerals to help with the energy transition.

“The rise of critical minerals has meant that the mining industry has a different way to pitch itself to the up-and-coming talent, because now we can legitimately say that we are the solution, after being tarred over many, many, decades.”