Arnold Dix was introduced to rocks at a very early age and he’s maintained a close relationship with them ever since. His parents were hotel keepers in an era where pubs were also boarding houses for single, older men, and when one of these lodgers passed away he left behind a small box of rocks in his wardrobe.
“They weren’t fancy rocks, but they really attracted my attention,” says Dix.
“The more I looked at them, the more I saw in them, whether it was their textures or colours or densities.”
Soon after, the Dix family moved to Jindabyne on the edge of the Snowy Mountain and the young Arnold had contact with men working on heavy drilling equipment.
“They thought that it was pretty cool that I liked rocks, and they’d offer to take me up and show me their work sites,” he says. “I would have been about 9 at the time, and as a kid it really impressed me.”
These early encounters set Dix on the course he has pursued ever since, combining science and then law to become a leading expert in underground tunnelling.
When he’s not doing that, he farms flowers on his farm at Monbulk in Victoria.
Not only a scientist specialising in engineering, where he was a professor at the Universities of Western Sydney and Tokyo City, Dix came to global attention in 2023 when he directed rescue operations in a collapsed tunnel in the Himalayas, an effort which saw the 41 trapped workers walk out alive against the odds.
The men were working on the Silkyara Bend-Barkot tunnel, designed to give drivers an alternative to the so called ‘death roads’ to the Hindu sacred sites perched at high altitudes, roads which had killed 39 people only weeks before the tunnel collapse.
Dix was in Europe when he received a call for help, and when he arrived in India there were fears that the rescue efforts could cause further collapse and doom the trapped workers.
“This is where it actually gets a bit weird, because as soon as I was asked, I promised that those 41 people would come out of that tunnel alive,” he says.
“I knew that if we didn’t believe we couldn’t rescue them, we wouldn’t.”
Rescuers had been using hand-held tools in an attempt to free the men after digging equipment had broken down.
Dix realised that using machines risked another collapse, so he directed a “soft and slow” approach where rocks were scraped away by hand only centimetres at a time.
All 41 men were rescued with the event broadcast across India, hailing Dix as a national hero and beginning a close association with India he enjoys to this day.
Today, Dix is often an early point of contact when tunnelling and mining accidents occur around the world, combining this work with his role as President of the International Tunnelling and Underground Space Association.
“Science was my first love, and it is what really drove me as a kid,” says Dix.
“My first degree was science and that took me up to a mine at Kakadu in the Northern Territory, because at that stage Australia was exporting uranium yellow cake to France.
“I remember I became quite agitated because I wasn’t convinced that the science that was being done was good enough, and then I upset the lawyers because I was chasing the truth too much, so I was making enemies everywhere.”
Undeterred by this, Dix was inspired to embark on a law degree in the belief that adding law to science would qualify him to better understand both “truth and justice.”
“I like truth and facts and evidence, and then that leads to justice because the exercise of discretion should be based on truth,” he says.
Dix uses this perspective of combining science and law in his role at the International Tunnelling and Underground Space Association, where issues around the social licence of projects can be critical.
“While I understand the joy of engineering and the thrill of building tunnels, I also understand that there needs to be a social licence to build these things,” he says.
“You don’t just bash through and ignore everybody, there is an ethical dimension based on social and environmental factors which is always really important. After all, we say that we do what we do for the betterment of the world’s people and the planet, so there’s a social licence at the forefront of everything we do.”
The advice Dix would give to asset management professionals is about outcomes, understanding that they are most often produced in the context of limited resources.
“You never have enough resources,” he says. “There is never enough money, you never have enough of the widgets you need, and inevitably you don’t have enough time.
“Take that all as a given and just focus on the outcome, don’t focus on the reasons you can’t get there but make everybody believe you can do.”
Arnold Dix is the author of the ‘Promise,’ which tells the story of the Himalayan tunnel rescue. He will be a keynote speaker for IPWEA at our International Public Works Conference running in Sydney from 25 to 28 August.
