The man who makes it work

Big, bluff and popular is how you would de scribe Frank Espie. Cheerful, active and interested in people. And competent.

His interest in people sometimes serves to disguise his competence in his job as managing director of Bougainville Copper Pty.—the operating company for CRA’s Bougainville project. Anyone who likes people so much, who believes in the team, who likes talking, listening and debating, is likely on occasions to have his basic competence at doing something more practical overlooked, especially in the tough mining business.

But Frank Espie was born a mining engineer— in 1917, in Burma. That is, his father was a mining engineer in a silver mine there—and young Frank just naturally followed the example, “I was simply influenced by my father,” he says. “And I still bleed for kids who have to choose their own career.”

Frank was sent back to Adelaide, South Australia, at the age of seven, to St. Peter’s College, and then went on to Adelaide University for his degree in mining engineering. He saw his parents for three months every three years.

“I didn’t get help from my father, but I was motivated to pass by my father,” he says. “He had a great influence on me, although I didn’t always agree with him. But it was now 1940 so I went into the Army.”

The next six years he was in Darwin, Palestine, Syria, and 18 months in New Guinea (where he ended in hospital—“kicked in the shins playing football”, he explains). He came back a captain.

He was 14 years with the Zinc Corporation in Broken Hill, but left there in 1961 (when assistant general manager), worked briefly for Comalco, then moved to Melbourne to become general manager of the industrial division of Conzinc Riotinto. And when Bougainville began to look promising, he got that.

He likes his BCP job because he can see things

happening. “Last year was my travelling year—l drank martinis last year while I talked money and copper”, he says, referring to the vast loans and forward copper sales that had to be negotiated abroad before he could pull out all the stops on Bougainville. “But this year it’s all happening.” (Picture shows him at Panguna, surveying the happening.) Frank Espie believes he holds a challenging top job because he’s been lucky. He luckily joined a growth company.

“You take an ordinary fellow and put him in a growth company, and give him a challenge and he’ll meet it,” he says, lowering his voice to a shout.

“The same fellow stuck in a non-growth company has had it in 10 years. Well, I joined a company that was expanding.”

With Frank Espie and his team on the Bougain ville end, CRA should keep expanding.