Engineering and geology students from Australia and New Zealand will dig, pan and muck their way across Langley Park this weekend as they go head-to-head in the 2025 AusIMM Asia Pacific (APAC) Mining Games Competition.
This year’s games, formerly known as the National Mining Games Competition, will be the biggest in the event’s history, with 34 teams from 14 student chapters of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (AusIMM) competing in a series of challenges based on old-school techniques.
The games – created following the 1972 Sunshine Mine Disaster in the US state of Idaho to honour miners who have lost their lives and keep traditional methods alive – will also go public for the first time, with the event held on Perth’s doorstep to accommodate the hundreds of competitors and showcase WA as a mining hub.
The 2025 event, which marks the 17th year of the competition, is being organised and hosted by student chapters from The University of Western Australia, Curtin University and the WA School of Mines, with support from several mining-related sponsors.
Principal organiser and engineering student Matt Robinson, from the UWA chapter, said the 2025 games would be a blockbuster, with the addition of a New Zealand chapter and the decision to open the games to the public significantly expanding their reach and impact.
“This year we’ll have nearly 200 competitors – twice as many as last year’s games in Brisbane,” Mr Robinson said.
“Typically the games have been held at universities, but the fact we’re holding them at Langley Park this year reflects how big they’ve become and how valuable they are as a way to connect the next generation of leaders with their peers and the broader mining sector.
“They’re loads of fun for the competitors and for spectators, but it also gives us a chance to really showcase the interconnectedness of the mining industry and show the public what mining is all about –maybe change a few perceptions and highlight what a big role mining plays in everyday life.”
A mix of men’s, women’s and co-ed teams will take part in a series of intensive, timed challenges featuring traditional skills including railway building, gold panning, wood sawing, surveying, hand steeling, air-leg drilling, and hand mucking – filling a cart with dirt using a shovel.
UWA chapter Treasurer Tom Salter, a final year engineering student who has competed in national and international versions of the games, said the old-school challenges helped celebrate and preserve mining traditions while showing how far the industry had come over the past 50 years.
“It’s a whole different world – basically everything back then involved manual handling, whereas in this day and age, it’s all highly mechanised with minimal manual labour,” Mr Salter said.
“For example, surveying now is digitised and does the calculations for you, but at the competition, we go back to doing it manually – finding your angle, calculating your distances and doing all the trigonometry yourself.
“It really fosters respect for the miners who came before us but also gives us a real appreciation of what we’re able to do now, at scale and with technology – all with the protection of safety procedures that didn’t exist at the time of the Sunshine Mining Disaster.”
Having been established to honour and learn from the Idaho disaster, the games – which have equivalent events in other countries – maintain a heavy focus on safe mining practices, situational awareness and a culture of care.
Each APAC competition event includes a scored risk assessment to focus competitors’ attention on potential hazards and how to avoid them.
“Imagine – you’re 400m deep and you have to shovel ore into a mine cart, handpick into a wall, then put the explosives in,” Mr Robinson said.
“Now, there are all these procedures where everyone has to be out of the mine before you fire. It makes you appreciate how hard it was back then and all the risks associated with every one of those tasks.”
The 2025 APAC Mining Games kick off at Langley Park this Friday 5 September and conclude on Saturday. For more information, see here.