The Accidental Geologist and now The Media Personality

4 hours ago

9 min read

The Samso dog in an Akubra hat, checkered flannel shirt, moleskin jeans and R.M. Williams boots, sitting in a leather armchair on red dirt beside a campfire, looking into an outback sunset. Caption: Somewhere out on the red dirt, watching the sun go down. Samso illustration

Somebody once called me an accidental geologist in a published profile, which was very accurate. It was never my intended career, and it was kind of an unthought-of career to get a piece of paper that would get me a job. It was a career that was created not out of passion, but out of necessity to get a job.

However, after over three decades in this industry, it somewhat feels like it was a fortunate accident. This accident has created the opportunities that have led me to my late discovery of my real passion for the industry.

1981

The plan was psychology

I arrived in Australia in 1981. I was eleven years old. A new country and loving the new sport, cricket. Hot summers was defintely a new phenomenoun and playing crickey in the summer (and winter) and hockey as a winter sport was again another new experience. AS it turned out, I would end up playing hockey consistently every winter for the next 6 years as a fullback and culmnating in scoring my only gols in my last game.

Going into university as a career path, which at that time was the only path to an educated career, and being a clinical psychologist was high on my list. I like the idea of how the brain functions, which, ironically, turned out to be a great insight into myself, as it allowed me to create many different paths over the three decades of my working career.

It was my perception of my inability to get the required marks that made me switch to geology, which I thought I would be a better chance at getting a decent grade ofr a Universtity degree.

That decision making process was in 1987 and I have thought about that decisive decision to take on geology as the start of my accidental journey. We tell young people that a career is a lifetime decision but I think in reality, we all go through phases that culminates all parts towards our so call career.

BAU, SARAWAK

There was gold in the family already

My grandfather mined gold in Sarawak after the Second World War. He had three mines around Bau. My father was a civil engineer and my mother was a teacher.

So the switch was not as random as it sounds. Nobody in my family pointed me at rocks, but the rocks were already there, a generation back.

BRONZEWING AND MERLIN, FROM 1992

Starting at the bottom of the hole

I graduated from the University of Western Australia in 1992 and started out as a field assistant at Great Central Mines, at Bronzewing.

Over a four week period, the job developed into a geologist position, and the fortune was being part of the team that discovered the Bronzewing gold mine. This was literally my first accidental step into what was then the largest blind gold discovery in Western Australia, so I am told.

Being part of a discovery that early in your career is worth more than most of what comes after it. You get to watch how a discovery plays out and how things are constantly changing, literally day by day. This was a great lesson as it taught me that project dynamics are never set in concrete, it is a day by day proposition with changes every singel day.

An exploration drill rig on red dirt under a low sun, with a row of sample bags laid out on the ground beside it. Caption: A rig, red dirt and a row of sample bags. Most of exploration looks like this. Samso illustration

I then moved to Ashton Mining to work at the Merlin Diamond Project in the Northern Territory, and again I was fortunate enough to be part of the discovery of what was to become the Merlin diamond mine.

In our geological jargon

What you are looking for there is what we call a pipe. It is a body of rock shaped roughly like a carrot standing on end, which has come up from very deep in the earth and brought diamonds with it. You are not looking for the diamonds. You are looking for the carrot.

Rows of geological drill core laid out in metal trays on a wooden bench, banded grey, green and rust coloured rock with white quartz veining. Caption: Core in the trays. This is the evidence everything else is argued from. Samso illustration

The ultimate gift for a graduate geologist in the first two years of his carrer was to be present at the discovery hole of Ector diamond pipe. To be the first to see the evidence of disocvery is a dream come true at such an early time of my career.

Two discoveries that early in my career really shaped how I think about exploration and the need to be excited about possibilities. To make discoveries, one has to take risks and to manage the process.

I also got to see how you need people who would do things that are not necessarily in their job scope of work. You need people, and you need to acknowledge people, who would go far for you in the times when you need that cost effectiveness and work efficiency.

Moving up from there, I went over to work in the goldfields at Norseman, and then to the Pilbara in a site manager role at what is now the Sino Iron ore project.

To make discoveries, one has to take risks and to manage the process.

THE DOWNTURN

1999

Then the industry stopped.

Anyone who was in exploration in the late nineties will tell you the same thing. Geologists become roof plumbers. They become taxi drivers. They become anything with a wage attached to it, and a good number of them never come back.

I have never fully lost the feeling from that period. It is why I do not get excited when things are good, and why I am not surprised when they are not. The cycle is the shape of this industry.

GALAXY

Tantalum, and then lithium before anyone wanted it

I came out of the downturn into tantalum. Tantalum is a metal that goes into the capacitors inside phones and laptops, so it was a reasonable business at a time when everybody was buying their first mobile.

The same work took me into early lithium exploration in Western Australia, with Galaxy.

Lithium was not fashionable then. There was no story around it and no queue of people wanting to fund it. That is worth saying out loud now that lithium has been through a full boom and a full bust and everybody has an opinion on it. The people working on it early were doing it because it was in front of them and it looked interesting.

Most of the good things I have been near started that way. They did not announce themselves.

SIBURAN RESOURCES, 2010 TO 2017

Building one of my own

In 2010 I founded Siburan Resources and took it to the ASX. I stayed until January 2017.

Running a listed company teaches you something that field work does not. The geology is often the easy part. The hard part is that a good asset and a market that understands it are two separate problems, and the second one does not solve itself.

That gap is where everything I do now came from.

SAMSO, FROM 2018

Why I started writing

Samso began in 2018 as a blog. Then it became Coffee with Samso, which is video, and which people know far better than the writing.

The reason for both was simple. I kept meeting investors who owned something they could not explain. Not for any want of cleverness. Nobody had ever translated it for them, and asking a basic question in public feels like admitting you should not be in the room.

I had spent twenty six years on the other side of that wall. It seemed like a waste not to reach back over it.

There was another reason too. One of the reasons that encouraged me to start Samso is that there was a thought in me to do something that had the least amount of interaction with human beings. To accomplish that at that time, writing blogs would be a great way of doing that.

A warm wooden writing desk at dusk with an open notebook, a fountain pen, a mug of coffee, a felt hat and a laptop showing a line chart, with an orange sunset through the window. Caption: The other side of the wall. A desk, a mug and a chart somebody has to explain. Samso illustration

TAITON RESOURCES, 2022 TO 2025

One more company while I was at it

Samso did not stop me doing the other thing. I was a Founder Director of Taiton Resources, which listed in December 2022, and I stayed with it until I retired from the company in December 2025.

Two jobs at once, and they fed each other. Sitting on a board reminds you what management is actually dealing with when a release goes out. Writing about other people's releases reminds you how they land on the other side. I do not think I would write the way I do without having done both.

THE ONE THING I CHOSE

And now the media thing

Media personality is a label other people started using. I did not pick it and at some point I stopped correcting them.

The work underneath it was not an accident. That part was a choice, and it is the only part of this story that was.

I was looking for a passion in life. Writing has always been something deep inside that I wanted to do, but I was never really accredited to be able to do that.

The decision to do Samso was probably the impetus to just give it a go. It was a discovery of this passion late in life, and it culminated in the development of Samso as it is today.

The deep dive aspects of Samso's writing, the deep dive discussion on Coffee with Samso, and the recent development of Samso Research really come down to a need to understand things in life. There must be a reason for the things that we do, and one of them would be investing.

The whole concept of Samso is the deep dive and the Research Media House, to make research less boring. Research is about gathering information so that an educated decision can be made.

It is also why Samso does not publish price targets or valuations.

On an exploration project, a valuation is meaningless. There is nothing there yet to put a number on. On a producing asset it is perfectly valid, and I have no argument with the people who do that work well. What a valuation cannot do is account for market forces, and most investors would tell you that market forces are what actually set the price of a stock.

Geopolitics and events nobody saw coming are what create the volatility we live with in equities. A valuation can be entirely correct and still be swept aside by them.

What stays useful is understanding the asset well enough to make your own decision when the number stops mattering.

The early lesson I had was to create that entry into an investment, and then when the story changes, or the story is out, you decide whether to divest from that committed investment or add to the position.

Writing has always been something deep inside that I wanted to do, but I was never really accredited to be able to do that.

AKUBRA

The hats

People ask about the hats more than they ask about the geology.

I collect hats. I enjoy wearing hats. It's kind of my passion, or a thing that I've been doing since I was young.

The fascination with Akubra hats will probably come from my fascination with old war movies that depict Australians and the ANZACs. Or probably it was something to do with the fanfare and the romantic side of being in a western, or in cowboy stories.

And being in the field of exploration geology, these hats seem to have a perfect place for that part of my life.

The hat has now become a symbol of Samso, and fittingly, it sits well with me.

Five wide-brimmed felt hats in slate grey, cream, dark brown, olive and tan hanging on wooden pegs against a timber wall. Caption: Most of them have a place attached to them. Samso illustration

IN CLOSING

What it adds up to

I did not choose geology and I did not plan a listed company. Both came from being in a place, paying attention, and following something because it was interesting rather than because it was the next step. The writing is the one thing I did choose, and I came to it late in life.

We put enormous pressure on people to have a plan. School asks for it. Parents ask for it. The professional networking sites are built on the assumption that a working life is a line going up and to the right, and that any deviation needs an explanation attached to it.

Mine has been a series of accidents with a fair bit of stubbornness holding them together, and one deliberate decision that arrived a long way into it.

That is not advice, and I am not going to tell anyone to abandon their plan. What I will say is that the plan is worth holding loosely, because the interesting things do not usually arrive on the schedule you set for them.

The dog agrees with me on this. He has never had a plan in his life and he has done extremely well.

Noel Ong in a brown felt hat and pink shirt sits at a picnic table on a roadhouse verandah, with Samso, a cream curly labradoodle, sitting beside him looking at the camera. Caption: A pit stop at Paynes Find, 2022

A note on the title

The phrase "the accidental geologist" comes from a profile of me published on 28 October 2022, written by Barry FitzGerald for The Australian Business Review and Stockhead, and reproduced on the Taiton Resources site. The second half of the title, and every word above, is mine.

The Words According To Samso is about sharing the experiences of decades in my journey. These are stories and news I have heard, brought back to life in 2026. Many of them have been told before, and The Words According To Samso is now bringing them back to readers, to share with those interested in 2026 and with future generations. No tickers, no research, no opinions on what anyone should own. samso.com.au

Every image on this page is artwork generated with AI, except the last one, which is a photograph of Samso and me.