Dr Bianca Newcombe was forced to change career paths after giving birth to her first child.
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Now she's proved to the whole world that it's more than possible to smash it in the business world while also raising a family.
The Orange mum recently won the Dyno Nobel Exceptional Woman in Australian Resources Award at the 2023 BHP Women in Resources National Awards.
It came after she won the Exceptional Woman in NSW Mining Award 2023 for applying her scientific expertise to the mining industry.
The owner and principal metallurgist of OptiFroth Solutions took up an industry-based PhD after becoming a mother and it led her to develop the niche business.
"I was there up against some fairly high calibre people from the other states and I was actually quite surprised when I did win," Dr Newcombe said.
This was the 10th year the awards have been held and Dr Newcombe said it was held in Canberra as part of Minerals Week.
"We went to a dinner the night before and there was thousands of the people there, it was insane, the Prime Minister was there and the ministers were there and Dami Im came and did a concert," she said.
"It's one of the biggest awards for the mining industry you can get."
An unusual journey
Dr Newcombe has worked at various mines but said she's had an unusual career.
While growing up in Brisbane a career in mining wasn't "on the radar" and she'd never heard of what was to become her specialty field, metallurgy.
"I had no idea about mining at all," she said.
Because she was good at maths and chemistry she went to university to study engineering.
"The original plan was to do electronics or something to do with computers but that was so boring in first year uni and chemical engineering was far more interesting so I ended up going into chemical engineering," Dr Newcombe said.
"I did that for second year and then I decided it just wasn't practical enough.
"It was just all maths and I knew it wasn't me so I had a talk to the head of a mining department and they said you should look at metallurgy or mineral processing as an option so I switched into that."
While studying she also met her husband Geoff Newcombe, who was studying mining engineering.
Need for change
Dr Newcombe went on to work as a metallurgist, extracting metal from rock in a processing plant in Western Australia.
However, all that changed when she had her first child in 2009.
"I was told I can't work in production anymore because of the 12-hour shifts," she said.
"I basically couldn't work on the mine site I was working at, which was in Western Australia at that point in time.
"There was no long daycare available."
A solution in sight
The childcare and parenting issues led her to resign from her job with Barrick Gold.
"The chief technical officer found out what was happening and offered me a paid PhD that I would be able to do working from home," she said.
"That's how I ended up going into academia, it was never my intention but that's what happened and I still had a job with Barrick through the University of Queensland doing a major research project for them.
"Because I had two more children while I was doing that it ended up taking five years in total with a bit of leave after each baby was born and by that point we'd already moved to Orange."
Move to Orange
She said the family moved to Orange seeking a place to raise their family in 2011 and have since had a third daughter.
"We were living in Kalgoorlie and we decided that we needed to move somewhere bigger, maybe a capital city or a big regional centre that was more amendable to young children," she said.
"Orange was on the list of potential places and Geoff my husband is a mining engineer, he applied for a job out at Cadia and he got it so he came over here.
Own business
In Orange Dr Newcombe set up her own company so she could do project work for different mine sites overseas.
"Some of my ex bosses were working internationally and they wanted me to do project work for them so I had to set up my little company to process the payments and I've worked like that ever since," she said.
"I do my consulting work sitting at my kitchen bench in Orange to mine sites on the other side of the world."
Some of those mines are in Canada, Chile, Indonesia and the Ivory Coast in Africa.
The contract work involves "managing very large geometallurgical projects and studies".
"That's everything from getting drilling rigs and drill core samples processed through laboratory test work to data analysis and mathematical modelling of ore bodies," Dr Newcombe said.
Industry changes for women
Since starting in the mining industry she's seen a lot of changes to help women in the industry such as flexible working arrangements.
Sexual harassment is now recognised as an issue and there's more training so it doesn't happen.
A remote mine site in South Australia has even started a creche so women can bring their toddlers on their five-day rotation.
"What I was doing when our eldest child was born was quite odd, people didn't work from home and they didn't work flexible times and it just wasn't normal. Now it's a bit more normalised which is good," Dr Newcombe said.
Side hustle
In addition to the contract mining work, Dr Newcombe also has a side business Bianca's Kitchen, The Orange Fermentary and sells her products online and at events such as the Orange Farmer's Markets.
She said she started the business in 2018 and started with apple cider vinegar but now also makes probiotics, preserves, pickles, relishes and salsas.
"I had an undiagnosed autoimmune disease, it wasn't one of the common autoimmune diseases, the treatments they give you weren't necessarily the right treatment so for a very long time the medicines just didn't work but they still didn't know what was wrong," Dr Newcombe said.
Her research indicated apple cider vinegar could be a solution for associated inflammation.
"Apple cider vinegar from the shop tastes like old socks so I just started making it myself and it tasted heaps better and my friends in town here in Orange said can you make some for us and you should really be selling that."