Salt of the Earth: Mhairi Cameron

Picture a geology student in her early twenties stepping off a plane in the dead of night in Freetown, Sierra Leone, with only a vague idea of what mining actually is. Three young blokes she has never met pick her up, drive her deep into the bush and drop her at a cabin with no power. Most people would panic. Mhairi Cameron decided she had found her calling. 

Today, Mhairi is General Manager, Operations at BCI Minerals, leading the Mardie Salt Operation on Western Australia’s Pilbara coast as it edges towards first salt. The eldest of five girls from Scotland and the first in her family to go to university, she has spent more than 15 years across geology, fixed plant, maintenance and port logistics, most recently running Rio Tinto’s Dampier port operations before joining BCI in May 2025. 

Determined, hard-working and refreshingly honest about an industry that, in her words, “wasn’t necessarily made for me”, Mhairi is exactly the kind of leader an operation like Mardie needs. Learn more about her journey below. 

From Scotland to Australia, how did you end up here? 

I grew up the eldest of five girls. My mum was a stay-at-home mum and my dad was a diesel mechanic; he and my granddad ran their own small truck firm, so I was always in and around heavy equipment. We were a family of very hard workers. I wasn’t the smartest in school, but I was definitely one of the hardest working. I was the first person in my family to go to university, and it is still one of my proudest achievements. My leaders often say determination is my middle name, and they’re right. 

I studied geology, because in Scotland that usually points you towards oil and gas. But at university I discovered mining, and it was a real twist of fate. One summer I applied for a global technical exchange program and was placed at a mine in West Africa. I literally bought myself a plane ticket to the middle of nowhere, my parents were freaking out. I turned up in the middle of the night, got picked up in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and was driven out into the bush to a little cabin with no power. I was living my best life. It was a dredging operation mining heavy mineral sands, and that was it. I was hooked, absolutely hooked. 

I finished my undergraduate in Glasgow and then went to the Camborne School of Mines in the south of England, which is where I connected with Rio Tinto. I did my dissertation with them, and at the end of my master’s my professor said, “You’re not the best in class, but you’re the best female… do you want a job in Australia?” I had 300 bucks in my pocket and grabbed the opportunity with both hands. That was the start of my mining career. 

What drew you to the mining and resources industry? 

What brought you to BCI Minerals? 

I’d been in a large organisation for a long time. There are huge benefits to that, but you don’t necessarily learn how to operate with agility, different challenges, different timeframes, faster decisions, a slightly higher risk tolerance. It just felt like the right time to practise my profession differently. 

When you come to somewhere like BCI, you have to be a builder. It’s not about taking the status quo and continuously improving it, which is a lot of what I’d done before; taking an operation and making it even better. Here, you’re actually building something from scratch. A lot of work goes into the design and preparing for operations, but it’s not until you’re in it that you realise something doesn’t work, and then you have to figure out how to build something that does. 

When you’re growing salt, you’re actually growing your ore body. I’m more concerned about what the weather’s doing than truck efficiency. I’m curious about the nutrients, about the evaporation and I get upset when it rains. What I love about salt is that it is perpetual. For as long as we need salt, it will be there. That’s exactly what I was looking to move into. 

What’s something people would be surprised to learn about you? 

I love country music, and I’m partial to a bit of singing. My favourite song is “Pontoon” by Little Big Town. 

What’s the best piece of career advice you’ve ever received? 

The best advice I’ve ever had is to look at your workload and ask: what are the things that only you can do? There are a finite number of things you can do in a day, so if there are tasks in there your team could do, they should be doing them. By prioritising the things that only you can do:  the decisions, the technical calls, the executive-facing work; you make room for what really matters, and you give your team room to grow. 

With first salt on the horizon, what’s the most exciting thing about Mardie right now? 

Seeing the salt grow… which sounds counterintuitive, because of course you hope it will. But when you think about how long this journey has been, around 10 years to get to the point where salt is actually crystallising, and crystallising the way we needed it to, and heading through the plant the way we needed, it’s incredible. I go out there pretty much every day just to check it’s still there. It’s like, are ‘you okay? You haven’t dissolved?’ It feels really precious… Way more precious than I expected salt to feel.