Trevor Shaw will never be the one leading the conga line at a wedding, not his style.

Whenever my wife and I attended an event he was at, I always tried to spend time with him. The old saying of still waters run deep applies perfectly to Trevor.

The Ojibwe are also known as the Chippewa and came to prominence with the release of Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot’s 1976 folk rock ballad The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Ironically, music has played a major part in Trevor’s life and his love for it has been passed on to his four children. In particular, his two youngest children, daughters Willow and Meadow, have danced their whole life and for Eisteddfods pull out some old classics.

“Meadow in particular,” Trevor said, “She has a very esoteric taste. There's sometimes her playlist comes on. I'm like, ‘Wow, you've been listening.’”

Certain songs provide indelible memories of where we were and who we were with when they come on and transport us back.

“I had to write a letter to Meadow in her last year (of school), and you know, you reminisce,” Trevor said with a nostalgic look of affection, “One of my memories that I wrote to her, one of my fondest and enduring memories.

“There's a song, Just the Two of Us, with Bill Withers and Grover Washington Jr. We were playing ping pong when she was about 8 and it came on and she started dancing to it and then she started singing to it, like it was a jam.”

Meadow is having the same memories imprinted on her from her father that he had with his own. The memories Trevor has of his father are only there because he was strong enough to acknowledge a problem he had and set about rectifying it.

His father was a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer and started the first undercover drug squad in Canada. He was the head of the squad and also part of it, which led to some interesting visits home.

“I distinctly remember my dad coming home in fur coats, looking like a pimp.”

His father also brought home a dog for the family, but though the tiny little canine became part of the family, it was the mode of delivery that Trevor recalls with an incredulous look and shake of his head.

“I must have been about 3 or 4 and my dad showed up in a firebird that looked just like the smoky and the bandit car, you know? I just saw that big falcon or phoenix on the front.”

Undercover work requires playing a part and sometimes the line’s blur, which is what happened to Trevor’s father.

“My dad developed an alcohol problem,” Trevor stated, “And he retired.”

It took courage to take the step and showed Trevor’s father was not afraid of introspection. It is a character strength his son showed at a young age.

“He recognised he had an issue and got himself out of it. I distinctly remember him, I was probably 10, saying, ‘Trevor, we're gonna be eating a lot of kraft dinner for a while.’”

Kraft dinner is sold in a cardboard box and contains dried macaroni pasta and a packet of processed cheese powder. Add the two and some water and you have a cheap macaroni and cheese.

It was a show of the family’s bond that the father and son had the first conversation, but Trevor never told his parents what he was doing. It was a glimpse into the man he would become.

“None of that hurt me and there was no blame,” Trevor reflected, “For me, it's an endearing memory because he didn't ever say ‘get ready to starve.’ It was just... ‘the family's going through some changes and this is what it's gonna be for a while.’”

Trevor’s father was away a lot with undercover work and he remembered it being tough, “I remember my parents fighting a bit about that. I didn't really understand what they're really fighting about, you know what I mean?”

Just before he retired, he was in Jamaica for about 6 months and Trevor remembers a lot happening around that time in his life.

“I remember him being away a lot and then all of a sudden, he was there and it was almost like he had a new lease on life. He decided he was going to do things with us that he loved when he was growing up.”

His father was an avid skier and so introduced his children to the sport; although Trevor was given a choice, the decision was quickly made.

“I remember getting the choice,” Trevor said with the hint of a grin, “‘You can have a ski or keep playing hockey,’ and I was like, oh, I'll go skiing.”

Trevor’s father took the kids out every weekend and then in summertime they used to frequent Ontario Place, an entertainment venue and park in Toronto located on three artificial landscaped islands just off-shore in Lake Ontario.

The Forum concert stage was one of the biggest draws to Ontario Place as it offered free concerts by a wide variety of prominent artists. The concerts were free with the price of admission to the park.

It had seating on all sides and a recessed stage that was round and revolved during concerts, offering an equal view of the stage to all seats. It sat 2,000 and could hold another 6,000 on the grass.

“He was an avid jazz fan and they had concerts every weekend. It was essentially all the '60s and '70s bands who were now in their 50s doing one more tour.”

They saw Three Dog Night and during summer they would go at least two or three times a month.

“To this day, I'll hear something and I'll be, ‘I saw them.’ And you realise, holy shit, I did see them in concert, with my dad.”

As he became older, Trevor could pay for himself and took himself off to see The Who and the Stones to name a few.

A lot of it was jazz and Trevor still listens to the same music now.

“That came from dad. The stuff I listen to now is the same stuff that I went to see at those concerts. And some of those just triggers those memories. So yeah, I had a really good relationship with my dad.”

It may seem his father did all the fun stuff, but mum was the cornerstone of the family. Their relationship endured those hard times because of honesty, respect and commitment.

“Now as an adult, when I see what they went through and what they built and what they repaired,” Trevor said with a slight shake of the head and look of admiration, “With all that you just go, Jesus. Good people, yeah. You know what I mean?

“Every marriage has it's struggles and, yeah, they made it look like it was easy, but I know it wasn't. I mean, the easy thing is to quit, isn't it? But the hard thing is to work through.”

Trevor’s father started an alarm company and was a private investigator as well. The business began small but grew and became profitable, but Trevor kept silently contributing in his own way.

When he could legally start working at 14, he began washing dishes in the kitchen at Mary Brown's fried chicken place. He was soon working 30 hours a week, starting after school at four o’clock and finishing at ten.

“I did that all the way through high school,” Trevor began before quickly adding, “Don't get me wrong, I'm never going to say that I grew up in poverty. I just didn't ever want to put that kind of pressure on my parents.”

He quickly became hyper independent and if he needed to buy clothes, he used his own money with always an eye to the future.

“My parents never made me feel like we were destitute by any stretch of imagination. I just knew they wouldn't be able to afford to put me through a university. So I started saving as soon as I could.”

I was amazed at the insight of Trevor as a young teenager, but is shows the character of the man. It shows his compassion for others and self-discipline and willingness to sacrifice; traits he exhibited at school.

His older brother, Steve, was dyslexic and while it was recognised back then, they did not know how to deal with it.

“He's always been a very hard worker but he was the one that had the toughest time at school. I'm pretty sure he taught himself to read later in life, worked hard at it in his 20s and 30s, I'd say.”

The work ethic of the Shaws is evident in Steve’s transformation in careers. He went to vocational school, which was like our TAFE, to get ready for work after high school. He worked as a sawer in a sawmill and then built roof trusses.

“He is still with the same company but now instead of building, he designs.”

Trevor’s sister went into working with disabled kids in the schools as a teenager and continues to do it as a teacher's aide.

Trevor didn’t enjoy school, but he worked hard and got top marks; that his parents never knew about.

“I always did well in school but, you know my brother struggled and my sister struggled and I almost felt embarrassed about my report card – as ridiculous as that is.”

Kids had to take their report card home and get their parents to sign it and then return it. Many would have forged a signature as they got older but Trevor was too honest.

“I remember getting my report card, folding it up into the smallest square I could muster to put into my pocket. And then it went through the laundry machine and I couldn't get it signed by my parents because it was just fluff.”

Subconsciously, he was hiding his results because of the relationship with his older siblings, who he knew struggled at school. With a shrug of his shoulders he mentions the punishment for not returning the signed report card.

So he kept turning up to detention and his parents never knew, though he admits times were different.

“It's not like today where you're always getting communication, which is great. Back then I could go for it, go for a week of detention and my parents wouldn't know.”

When he finished school, Ontario, at the time, had a thirteenth grade that was called Ontario academic credits. It was in essence where kids went to do the hard subjects and get ready for university.

You only took the Ontario academic credits if you intended to go to university, otherwise you graduated and headed off to work. Back then going to university was the rarity and trades the norm; the reverse of today.

Ontario was the only Canadian province that had the academic credits, but Trevor saw it as a blessing when he arrived at university.

“I went to a university outside Ontario as a 19 year-old and I knew kids in my first year who were only 17; and there's a big bloody difference. Some of those 17 year-olds were really smart kids but were still wet behind the years.”

From an early age, Trevor convinced himself he wanted to go into medicine and was accepted into the renowned Queens University in Kingston, about two and a half hours away from home.

In Canada, you didn’t go straight into medicine in your first year. You went into another degree and either finished it and then applied or you could apply after 2 years of university.

So, Trevor went into what was called life science, a stepping stone for going into medicine. If you finished the degree, you could go into biotechnology and develop new drugs but most were on a path to get into medicine.

Subjects included calculus, physics, biology, chemistry, and other similar themed topics. However, you had to pick one elective.

“I chose geology,” said Trevor with a mischievous look, “I looked at it as the fun class, right?”

Toward the end of his first year, he started thinking about work over the summer break.

“I was like, ‘what's the one class that I never would miss? That I look forward to every day?’ It was Geology.”

Each residence had a PhD student in charge that is like the mum or dad of the floor, despite the fact they were only in their late 20s. So Trevor just asked how do I get a job?

The reply was the same one Trevor now gives to his kids and anyone else that asks.

That’s what Trevor did, he took a train around Easter to Ottawa, five hours away, with copies of his resume to hand out. The steel underneath was on show again when he was met with a stonewall.

When he went to a Geological Survey government building the concierge refused to let him in without an appointment. Condescendingly telling him, ‘no son, if you don't have an appointment, you've got to go.’

“He got busy with someone else and I went, fuck this. I was on a train for 5 hours you asshole. So I snuck past him and I just knocked on all these very startled scientist doors.”

When they asked who he was he introduced himself and told them he was a first year geology student wanting to get some field work. His persistence paid off, though there was a hiccup at the start.

“I was supposed to go up to Ellesmere Island, which is way up at the top of Canada, like, halfway up Greenland.”

So that’s what Trevor did. It was a 30-hour journey by train on a track that goes where roads don’t.

Eventually he arrived at his destination and got off to find emptiness, no station and no one to meet him.

“Nothing,” Trevor emphasised, “Just a road, like a logging road and a railroad track perpendicular to it. I thought they're probably on the other side of the train so I'll wait till the thing goes by and they will just be over there.

“And yeah, the train goes and I'm looking and I'm like, fuck, there's no one here.

“You had no communication, no way of communicating. I'm just on a railroad crossing and a road that doesn't exist on a map.”

Six hours later he was sitting on his pack with the batteries in his Walkman running out. With two hours of light remaining Trevor realised he might need a fire and started collecting kindling to light a fire in the middle of the road.

“It's not like someone's gonna run me over.”

What he didn’t know was that it was the beginning of an adventure that changed the course of his life. He would fly in beaver float planes – the ones with pontoons that landed on the water.

“We put the canoes on either side of the pontoon and our provisions in the back. You need to have room for a pilot, a passenger, and then a passenger behind.

“We'd land on lakes, get out, do our field work and camp for a week or two and then they'd pick us up and we'd go to the next one. Sometimes we’d portage to the next lake and meet them there.

“Very adventurous, really enjoyed it.”

The plane would land ahead of them and leave caches of food, sometimes in steel lockers on a beach because of the bears. Fortunately, Trevor never came face to face with one; on that trip.

“I was up in Thompson, Manitoba, on a different job. We were walking along two parallel tree lined ridges and they're really quite high. The trees were sparse enough where you could see pretty clearly on the other side. We had walkie-talkies.”

He didn’t have any pots and pans to make noise because all he carried was a tin cup. The less weight the better. So he carried no thermos or water bottle, just that tin cup.

“The water was so clean,” Trevor said with a sense of wonder, “When it came to a stream, which was everywhere, you just dipped your cup and drank. It was beautiful country.”

It was enough to get the wheels in Trevor’s mind turning as to where his future may lay.

“That first summer. That was when I went, ‘I can get paid to do this? This is fantastic.’”

Trevor returned to university and then toward the end of the second semester a seminal moment occurred.

“I was getting ready for Christmas exams. I was in my second semester of anatomy and I remember it being around 11 o'clock at night. I’m in the lab with a cadaver learning the muscles.

“I'm in the basement and I distinctly remember it's really cold. It was like -25 having to walk there. I just looked around and thought, ‘it’s 11 o'clock at night and I'm in a basement in school. What am I doing here?’

“I just had the biggest adventure in my life a couple months ago, you know what I mean? And I went ‘I don't want to do this.’”

The next day he went and changed his degree and felt a massive weight lifted off his shoulders. He knew he’d done the right thing and never asked for anyone’s advice.

For so many years, Trevor had been telling his parents he was going into medicine. Imagine any parent’s reaction when after getting a summer job and running around Northern Ontario, camping all summer, your child announces they’ve changed their degree and is doing Geology?

Nothing against Geology, as it is a fine profession, but we all know there is a slight lifting of the nose when you announce your child is a doctor.

“For me, I took the view that when you're paying for it yourself, this is my degree, I'm paying for this so I’ll do what I want to do, and this is what I want to do.”

Trevor had saved enough money so that he had his first two years, books, tuition and living costs already paid. It was a period of his life that shaped the advice he now passes onto his own children.

“I've always encouraged them to be courageous, especially in their early 20s. This is the time you can make mistakes, Who cares, you’ve got a long life ahead of you.

“If they choose to travel for instance, then travel. I tell each and every one of them, ‘you've got a soft place to land. You always have a bed.’”

When Trevor reflected on his career and travails, he says he just fell into things. There was always a purpose behind it but it was never such a regiment of purpose.

It was that old hilux that provided invaluable time and space for Trevor to pass on his wisdom to his children. In Canada you can get your learner’s permit at 16, but if you’re good enough, you can do your driving test on the same day.

“So when I had to do 100 hours with each kid, yeah it's pretty painful, but they're some of the best hours you'll ever have with your teenager. They don't listen to you much but now you've got them as a captive audience for 100 hours.

“I used to just natter at them and while it was partly to get them used to having some external stimulation, I didn't know it but later on you realise each and every one of them was soaking it in.

“You talked about lots of different things, investing, university, trades. Gage, my oldest son, wanted to be a tradie and you know, he might love it but you might also realise that you might want to do something differently.

“That's okay, because these are all building blocks. And I used to always make sure they knew they were going to work for 50 years so you better like what you do. But don't be afraid to jump from one thing to another, don't be afraid to pull a plug and start anew.”

“I'm selling door to door phone subscriptions and you could take the view, and many would, that it's not a great job. It didn’t kill me and it gave me beer and meant I didn't have to go home yet.”

As I said at the start, Trevor is not the person who will be at the front of the conga line, but his door-to-door days highlight his introspection and courage to address any deficiencies.

“It (selling) wasn't something that came naturally to me because I can be introverted and I have to work at not being so. It was horrifying and there were days I didn't make a cent.”

It was a time before mobile phones, where each local call cost you a fixed rate and long distance calls were billed by time. The country only had one company and then around that time they opened up the market.

With all different types of companies suddenly entering the market, long distance charges were cut in half, sometimes more. Ever a deep thinker, Trevor quickly identified that he made money when he went to the poorest demographics he could find.

“I was always honest, I never bullshitted with them. It was just trying to relate to them as to what would motivate them to change the phone plan, to get a cheaper rate.”

He would break things down and equate the money saved to another case of beer or carton of cigarettes.

“I learned a lot about what motivates people.”

After that short stint, he worked on a seismic and gravity survey of the Oak Ridges Moraine, north of Toronto. The Oak Ridges Moraine is 400 kilometres long and can be seen from space.

Formed by the retreating of the continental glaciers that created the Great Lakes, it was perfect for an aquifer. Completely sealed and ready to tap. The project was looking for potential groundwater resources north of Lake Ontario.

The reason was to negate the need to build pipelines that went all the way to the north of Ontario to service the water needs of cities and towns projected to be established in the next 100 years.

The crew had a lot of fun and came up with new and innovative ways to collect data; including using an old buffalo gun that was essentially a rudimentary shotgun. 

They also had computer nerds who would work down to binary numbers to fix their computers. The ground printing radar used is the same radar that was being developed to go on the Mars rover.

“The scientist I was working with was crazy, but he was a hell of a lot of fun to be with. He was responsible for developing that technology to go up to Mars and the thing he was trying to work on was the fibre optics, which were only new.

“It was a very big thing because it's -200°F up there, so how do you get electronics to work? They were trying to take temperature off the table with fibre optics.

“It was really hands-on, man. I really loved it. Hell of a lot of fun.”

In fact, the ground penetrating radar they used was used by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to find graves of serial murders. They took the equipment into the woods and actually found five gravesites, but it did not help Trevor with his thesis.

He began to get frustrated because he was completing a thesis as well as fulltime work and after five months, he began to feel the effects of burnout. That however was only one thing he noticed.

So he decided to go travelling and booked his ticket. He told his boss he had six weeks to train someone to finish the survey and then he was gone.

Trevor had a travelling companion but before they left, his grandmother fell ill and he decided he couldn’t go at that time. So Trevor ended up going alone and for a week and a half, walked around London and spent a lot of time in the free London Museum.

It was then the most important serendipitous moment of his life came to be.

“I decided I better meet some people.”

He went to book a 28 day Contiki Tour but they had just sold out. They had a 21 day trip leaving in two days, so Trevor signed up. There was a young Australia girl who missed out on the 28 day trip so signed up for the 21 day as well.

It was at a time when global warming was at its zenith and Trevor’s entire geology class at university had a t-shirt they all wore. On the front was a big photo of Planet Earth with the words Earth first. Then on the back it said, ‘we’ll mine the other planets later.’

So when she asked him a greeny question regarding an oil company, he thought he had blown it.

“So I was like, ‘Ah, kind of blew that. Okay, I didn't come here to find that, I came here to travel.’”

They travelled the 21 days and when they finished, Trevor had already rented a car. He was by himself so he asked Erica and her friends that if they wanted to, to just hop in.

Five of them squeezed into a little Vauzhall and drove up to Scotland and Ireland. They then drove to the Czech Republic and stayed at a chalet for Christmas.

“Erica and I got together in a place called Český Krumlov. It's in the Czech Republic and where they make the original Budweiser.”

Budweiser Budvar beer is brewed by the Czech company Budweiser Budvar Brewery and has been in operation for over eight centuries.

In 1876, Adolphus Busch and his friend, Carl Conrad, developed a "Bohemian-style" lager in their brewery in St. Louis, Missouri, inspired after experiencing the original Budweiser on a trip to Bohemia.

There has been a long trademark dispute and consequently Budweiser Budvar beer is imported as "Czechvar" in Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Philippines and the United States.

Anheuser-Busch sells its American brewed beer in over 80 countries but is marketed as "Bud" in most of the European Union; where Budvar has use of the Budweiser name.

Trevor then went to Poland with another mate for a month and Erica went back with her friends to London.

“I walked into the common room of the hostel with all these people lounging around and I hear, ‘Trevor Shaw.’ And there's my mate that was supposed to go travelling with me all that time ago.”

In pre-mobile phone and facebook days, communication was much slower and he didn’t know what his mate had been up to. He was there with his girlfriend and so the three decided to travel together; with Trevor’s destination as Townsville.

He first worked in an abalone plant where they also made soup. His job was to inspect the cans because every sixth or seventh can would have a tiny little blip that would allow contamination if left on a shelf.

In a sign of how far we have come with quality control, the way to inspect the cans was to trail your fingernail around the top of the can. He was amazed that they would entrust the task to someone they had never met.

While Trevor was conducting his quality control with his fingernail, there was a ring of ladies, who all looked like they were Eastern European, old Soviet Bloc ladies. These ladies were tasked with shucking abalone.

“These poor things were standing all day shucking abalones in a big circular thing with ankles like this,” Trevor holds his hands a foot apart, “The break bell would go and it's like the Flintstones, you know, everyone goes, ‘yabba, dabba, doo.’”

Most people would head out to have something to eat or drink or a cigarette. Trevor said these ladies would go to the sacks of potatoes and just lie prostrate on the ground so they could put their feet up.

Trevor was standing as well but in front of him were pallets of cans and so he sat on the boxes to do his work. The ladies were not impressed and complained to the supervisor that he should be made to stand like them.

“You must stand,” The supervisor told Trevor who was not backward in coming forward with his reply.

Trevor kept his job and the ladies were provided with seats; though there was no thank you offered. After two weeks, he had enough money to begin his trek to Townsville and headed to New South Wales to pick fruit.

When he finally he had enough, it was on to his final destination.

When he arrived, Erica’s mother was kind enough to let this weird ass Canadian with curly long hair without a job to stay in the spare room. That weekend, Trevor got a job driving a roller at the Cluden race club.

“I was asked if I could drive it (the roller). I'm looking at it thinking who my age has ever driven one? I thought ‘Jesus Christ it goes forward and back, doesn't it.’”

So he drove his roller, that went three kilometres an hour and took an hour to do one lap, as people walked past him. Unfortunately the reverse beeper was stuck on whether the roller was going forward or back and so all he heard all day was beep, beep, beep.

After three weeks he thought he had a psychological injury, because for weeks after he stopped, that was all he heard. He then did a month’s work in Western Australia as a geologist and followed it up with stints with other companies.

From when they got together in Czech Republic, he and Erica were boyfriend and girlfriend. After a year in Australia, he proposed around Christmas 1995 but the common sense of the Australian Government meant Trevor had to return to Canada to get a spouse or a fiancé visa.

After buying the engagement ring, he didn’t have much money so headed home to Canada to make some money in order to save for a wedding and get his fiancé visa paperwork done.

The problem for Trevor was that every time he called up, he kept getting different answers as to how long it should take. One answer was six weeks to six months which freaked him out because he had a wedding date booked.

So Trevor decided he would make it impossible to be told no and put everything required together like a thesis.

“I was like, I just need to make this as easy as possible. So I basically came up with a big binder that I wasn't putting in the mail.”

He took a train up to Ottawa and arrived at the Australian embassy about 3:30pm and they were shutting at 4pm. He was able to lodge it and headed home that night not knowing how long he would have to wait.

It seems his tome caught the attention of all and sundry.

“They said they got this thing, they went, ‘What the hell is this?’ I had tabs and everything and it was so easy to go through that they got it done in 20 minutes.”

He called Erica just before Christmas and they were married in July, 1998. They bought a block of land in Bushland Beach and because they were so used to living as backpackers, they lived off Erica’s wage and paid off the loan with Trevor’s.

A year and a half later they were able to build. During this time he was working as a contractor around Australia and it was his eldest son, Gage, a toddler by this stage, that provided him the evidence he needed to settle down.

“He was bragging to his kindie mates that I was pilot. I went through our photos and every photo I've got Gage bouncing on my knee - but I'm in an airport. So I thought, ‘Yep, time to get a job here.”

Trevor was actually working in Mount Isa already as a contractor after passing an initial test with flying colours. When he arrived for an interview he was too early, so he went over to exploration to see some rocks and introduce himself in case he didn’t get the job.

Unbeknownst to him, exploration had been taken and internalised at the mine under Alice Clark, who he was meeting for the interview. He had a look at their rock garden and all the rocks that are at the front office and headed back for the interview.

“Alice, she gives me a rock, and she says, ‘what do you see? ‘ I said ‘well there's gold here, here, here. This is pink rock gloss stone from Tick Hill.’”

When the R62 office was closed in 2018 or 19, that same rock that Alice had given Trevor made its way back to exploration and sits on his desk to this day.

He began work at the start of the century in the old Black Rock open cut. Then just before Christmas 2004, he got the call to redesign the entire program and focus completely on the Black Star Open Cut as the company became zinc focussed.

In 2004, he was still working as a contractor, but the wheel was turning for the world’s economy and mining, so he took the opportunity to apply for fulltime work and move to Mount Isa.

Gage and second son, Chase, were born in Townsville and daughters, Willow and Meadow, followed in Mount Isa. With the family together, Trevor moved out of the Parkside Flats into a house and they became residents.

He went to work underground to get experience and understanding of mapping and block modelling. He very quickly found out that he didn’t have patience for the work; and neither did many others.

Trevor was the Project Geo for Enterprise and a big part of what he was doing was figuring out where we were going to be drilling in the next couple of years. The problem was trying to look ahead and plan when most focus was on getting ore up now.

If you have 50,000 metres of drilling to do and 50 places you needed to drill but you don't know where you are going to be, how do you budget for that?

“My job was to map that out,” explained Trevor. “Rank the most important areas where we should look, to extend the ore bodies, and then attack that. Then figure out how we're going to open up the old levels to be able to get back in there and drill.”

The idea was not so much to find new ore bodies, but to confirm the extent of what was there and extend the mine life. He opened at least five or six different levels for exploratory drilling to find out how far north the Northern 500 ore body went.

How far North did the 3000 ore body go because they didn't know yet.

“And the 1100 ore body didn't look like it finished to me, it looked like it kept going. So that was the premise of the expiration from underground. And yeah, we ended up adding another kilometre of stopes all the way along Northern 1100.”

That meant instead of closing in 2010-2012, the mine extended to 2016 and then 2019, all due to the work done in 2004 to 2006.

It basically meant there was enough ore coming up the shaft to remain profitable and the mine kept going until 2025. It was that work that got Trevor his promotion in 2007.

There is an old saying that you can tell if the economy is good by the amount of exploration. For a decade, the economy was rolling along until another resource recession raised its head around 2016.

It was then that Trevor’s long since time as a door-to-door salesman came in handy.

“We had a budget,” Trevor stated, “But the tech services people are eyeing me off going, ‘how the hell did you get money? We don't even have enough money to drill our own stuff.’”

“I'm like, ‘Oh, I'm gonna lose this battle real fast.’ And I just said to Mike Westman, we need to take our budget and put it to drilling at the bottom of the Black Rock open pit.”

He felt the data from earlier drilling was compromised and when they drilled, they found almost the exact same metal as it would have been for a copper starter pit, but it was actually all in one discrete area.

It was the 500 ore body so it was high grade, somewhere around 5% copper. It meant that if you could do it from underground it would actually be cheaper than an open cut.

“They realised that I could go from the south end of the Black Star open cut, do a kilometre of a decline at the bottom of that open cut and be underneath; like a rock cave.”

It gave the ability to start a mine without any capital or at least shorten the time frame immeasurably. So when Matt O’Neill was in charge, that is what he did and it was part of that additional ore that kept the mine going for an extra seven years.

The Shaw family expanded and settled into the flow of Mount Isa and Trevor and Erica never had an issue with raising their children in the city.

“Never had any dramas about them growing up in Mount Isa,” Trevor said emphatically, “To the point where we've had opportunities to go, particularly from a professional point of view to work in Brisbane.

“Erica and I always took the view that if we were asked to move to Brisbane, we'd stay here and I would just fly in and out to there. We wanted to see our kids brought up here until they're ready to leave the nest.”

When he took the job he thought he had three years at the most and feels that every extra year has been a bonus.

“You know, it’s been a gift,” Trevor reflected, “You know what I mean? In this day and age to be able to do this type of job with these type of rocks around you.

“I mean this is one of the most incredible geological provinces in the world. And to bring up your family here, yeah, that's pretty special.”