ELLE SMART

Metallurgist

Elle Smart planned on being a dentist until she took a job on a mine during a gap year and fell in love with the work.

“They have this amazing equipment that they use to recover the really fine gold and I remember seeing these floating bubbles of gold and thinking how incredible this process was. They were taking a dirty old rock and making it into this gorgeous gold bubble, and I was sold straight away. I applied to switch my degree,” Elle says.

Now a senior metallurgist at the Mt Marion lithium mine, Elle, 27, loves her job, but she’s not blind to the barriers that discourage women from pursuing a career in mining. Straight out of school she landed on her first mine site and found she was the only girl in the camp.

“There was no girls’ bathroom. It was all just a shared thing,” she says. “I rocked up and I was absolutely petrified. It took me a while to come out of my shell, but with the showering thing, the guys were really respectful. I had my own cubical and they stayed away.”

Having grown up with a geologist father and big sister, Elle says she didn’t have “the shock factor” other women might. She worked alongside her sister early on and remembers thinking, “Wow, she’s holding her own and arguing and getting her point across. I’ll be fine. If she can do it, I can do it.”

It didn’t take long for Elle to find her feet, but she acknowledges this isn’t everybody’s experience. “I’ve never had anyone overtly harassing me,” she says, “but I don’t want to give the impression that it’s a great, wonderful place all the time. It is still quite a big boys’ club.”