If, as he left his native Kenya to study forestry at Oxford, you had told Rob Ryan that five years later he would be settling in Alice Springs as the Australian Government’s minerals geologist, he would have questioned your sanity. He had not even heard of Geology! But that is what happened, and this is the story of how it happened. It is also the story of his lifelong supporter - his Kenyan high school girlfriend and wife, Judy - and their families, and of the vicissitudes of a geologist’s life in outback Australia: the characters, the challenges, and the long separations that a geologist’s family may have to endure. It is also a story of the unrelenting search for minerals to replace those that the human race consumes at a huge rate in order to survive and without which the planet could not sustain the population that it does. This search has taken the author from the rainforests of Borneo to the deserts of Egypt; and from the luxury home of a Minister in the government of the Shah of Iran in Teheran to a ceremonial welcome in Fiji.