Andrew Cuthbertson

Andrew Cuthbertson was born in Great Britain and raised in New Zealand and has lived and worked in some thirty-five countries on four continents throughout the world.

After a period of service with the New Zealand Army he completed a thirty-five year professional career in the international mining industry in senior positions with the Rio Tinto and AngloGold Ashanti groups of companies. He played a contributing role in the discovery and development of copper-gold mines in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Mongolia, and Colombia, and supervised high-level geopolitical and stakeholder engagement in fourteen countries across four continents. In that time, he wrote extensively on the mining industry and historical aspects of colonial mining investigations in South-East Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe, and lectured to industry groups and post graduate students in Australia and Canada.

Between assignments he developed his interest in raising and training German Shepherd tracker dogs, investigating the military history of his family, and writing about his experiences in the international mining industry.

As State Publicity Officer for Australia's largest state breed dog club, the German Shepherd Dog Club of Victoria, from 2000 to 2004, he reported on newsworthy current events for a number of national and internationally circulated magazines. He published articles promoting the breed as a working animal and responsible member of the community. Wide recognition was received for his short story recording the life and experiences of his first working tracker dog.

In 2004, he authored and published his first book, "Neither the Time nor the Tide", on his father's distinguished Second World War military career, that sold internationally among Royal Navy veterans of the North Atlantic, Mediterranean, and South-East Asian theatres of war.

In 2019, he authored and published his second book, "Posting to Mongolia", to critical international acclaim documenting his experiences operating in Mongolia in the wake of the collapse of the former USSR and the opening up of the country to Western business interests. The Book presents a rare first hand account of geopolitical stakeholder engagement in developing countries and documents the involvement of the US, British, German and Japanese governments to ensure a stable investment climate for the development of one of the world's largest undeveloped copper-gold deposits in the face of competition from Russian and Chinese interests.

In 2020, he authored and published his third book, "Mary Kathleen Reflections: A loss of innocence working at a uranium mine in the Australian outback", presenting a first hand account of the experiences of a young man entering the workforce for the first time and his observations of this remote outback mine and the tight knit community that supported it at the height of the Cold War. It was the subject of an Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio interview, five national and international book reviews, and reached number eleven in Amazon’s top fifty online new book sales published through May–June that year.

In 2021, he authored and published his fourth book, "Echo Foxtrot", the third and final book in a trilogy documenting his life as an experienced frontier explorer. Andrew’s early life experiences working in some of the remotest regions of Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and the Philippines form the core of Echo Foxtrot. The book describes the physical and emotional challenges of exploring for mineral deposits in harsh environments and engaging with Indigenous Peoples living there. It documents the uncertainty of employment in the context of the transformational geopolitical and economic trends affecting the international mining industry through the 1980s and 1990s. Andrew was intimately involved in the inception of some of the world’s largest copper-gold mining projects. Eventually, he found himself at the epicentre of early relationship building and stakeholder management in some of the most challenging jurisdictions in Africa, Asia, Australasia, and South America.

The author is married and currently live in retirement in Perth, Australia.