PROFILE (September 30, 1991)

The time: after dark. The place: an Ontario provincial park. Prospector Pete, who wears a grizzly red beard and a funny old hat, comes from the ice age. Stomping around in big boots before an audience of modern-day park visitors, he is engaged in a dramatic dialogue with an imaginary friend, geologist Jerry. Pete shows his disdain toward geologists who travel by plane and stay in hotels whereas he, as a prospector, sleeps in tents.

That is the well-attended Prospector Pete show, featuring Mary Garland as Pete. Through the ongoing dialogue, her audience learns the roles played by prospectors, geologists and miners. Garland created her alter ego in 1984 when she was staff geologist in Dorset, Ont. Now based in Thunder Bay, Ont., as regional minerals specialist, she continues to share her mining knowledge with the public.

Pete’s performance is preceded by an afternoon rocks and minerals road show, also presented by Garland. “Children are attracted by the sparkle, color and shape of rock samples,” she said in a recent interview with The Northern Miner. “Adults are interested in the sources and uses of the minerals.” Regardless of age, the spectators learn that minerals play an essential part in their daily lives: florite for their toothpaste, graphite for pencils, quartz for glass and rubies for lasers, for example.

Born in Toronto in 1951, Garland grew up in Alberta and returned to Ontario for her university education. She received her B.Sc. (1974) and M.Sc. (1987) in geology from the University of Toronto. She often shares teaching strategies with her father, a professor of geophysics. A licensed pilot and a scuba diver, she wants to explore the sky, the oceans and the ground. Garland had worked for Noranda Inc., Falconbridge Nickel Mines, United Keno Hill, Bethlehem Steel, Teck Corp. and Urangesellschaft Canada before she joined Ontario’s Ministry of Northern Development and Mines in May, 1983. She is often identified with the Cal Graphite mine near Burk’s Falls, Ont. “I was the catalyst who mapped the graphite occurrences in central Ontario,” she says. “I realized that the Cal Graphite occurrence was actually larger than originally believed, and showed this to the prospectors who had just staked the property. The deposit is now in production.”

Garland believes that Canada’s resource industries are in trouble unless an integrated land use policy can be developed. “There is a phenomenal amount of ignorance in the general public sector of just how important our mining industry is,” she says. “Some of the comments made by pro-environmental groups are quite damaging to the mining industry’s image.”

At present she is promoting Thunder Bay amethyst. She maps the mineral’s occurrences and markets it in North America.