These flashes of fancy are by no means a gimmick for standing out in the increasingly competitive contract mining scene – they represent a whole way of doing business.

While many contractors are quick to take you on a tour of the nuts and bolts of their mining operations, any investigation into Redpath’s activities leads more directly to an impressive resume of community engagement efforts.

This includes a steady flow of charity fundraisers (hence the coloured equipment) and outreach programs, the likes of sponsoring an annual camel race for a local high school in need.

Redpath chief executive Rob Nichols told MiningNewsPremium that this was business as usual.

“Anyone can go out and buy equipment but it’s the people who operate it and supervise it that make the difference and they all live in communities,” he said.

“Being part of where we work, we want to give back as much as we can.”

Redpath employs about 585 people at operations around the country, notably including BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam copper operation in South Australia and Cannington lead-silver mine in Queensland where the contractor has worked for almost a quarter of a century.

The solely underground-focused company prides itself on offering a rare combination of coal and metalliferous know-how, which allows for integration of techniques and potential mining solutions.

Meanwhile, operating nationwide and as part of a global organisation sprawling every continent only further enhances this pool of knowledge.

Nichols puts all this in the context of an industry where the key advantages remain uniquely human: innovation, adaptability, talent, expertise, situational problem solving and, most of all, relationships.

“A contractor’s only as good as his last job,” he said.

“Reputation is important for us. That’s the way we operate and it’s the way you’ve got to operate to be successful – and Redpath’s been around for 50 years.

“You’re not around for that length of time without getting some things right.”

Redpath celebrated its golden anniversary in 2012, with a commemorative book Redpath – The First Half-Century and a reaffirmation of core values by the group’s Canada-based global president George Flumerfelt.

Organisations that have been around longer than most people can remember often have their own kind of creation myth, a venerable but unread plaque in the lobby or a larger-than-life founder etched vaguely into a distantly removed corporate machine.

In discussing Redpath’s history, however, Nichols says the company hasn’t lost its family feel, effortlessly evoking Jim Redpath’s one-man start-up in 1962 and the entrepreneur’s personally written guidelines, which still permeate the company, unchanged since day one.

This philosophy focuses largely on giving back: not only to the community but to the broader industry as well.

“One of our guidelines from the Jim Redpath days has employees providing well written technical papers that appear in publications,” he said.

“We try to transfer what we’ve learned from difficult projects to help our industry out.

“It’s a bit different from a contractor’s point of view, because contractors are usually a bit secretive about how they’ve done things, just for a competitive edge.

“But it’s one of those guidelines engrained in the Redpath way of doing work.”

Key innovations from the company have included successful integration of civil engineering and metalliferous mining methods to the coal sector, most notably via the use of a tunnel boring machine at Anglo American’s Grosvenor project in Queensland.

In a first for the state’s coal space last August, Redpath operated the 8m-diameter TBM to excavate two drifts at the site, anticipating it to be three times faster than the traditional method of using a road header.

This method brought with it an accelerated timeframe for the project and a number of safety benefits associated with the TBM’s method of ground support installation.

“Most of the major contractors at the moment provide good management, good safety and good equipment,” Nichols said.

“You’ve got to rely on the efficiency and innovation factor to be different than someone else to secure work.

“It’s a cliche but if you’re not innovating and you’re not changing, you’re basically going backwards.”