J. W. Sutherland

He then worked in Western Australia as metallurgist for Lake View Consols under General Manager H. G. Callahan,[2] from 1896 to 1899, devoting much of his attention to the problem of "slimes", clayey ores that resisted the usual processes of jigging (agitation with water), vanning and froth flotation that concentrated the ore by removing much of the gangue, and resisting the percolation through the mixture of cyanide, as used to remove the gold content.

From 1899 to 1929 he worked as metallurgist and General Manager at the Golden Horseshoe Estates, Ltd mine, producing between £300,000 and £400,000 worth of gold annually.

The outcome was that mine sites were littered with great mounds of tailings, potentially valuable but unsightly and dangerous, and the airborne dust invasive and poisonous; difficult to smelt and too contaminated to ship economically to Europe.

While at the Lake View Consols, Sutherland revolutionized the washing of "slimes", and incidentally saved a great deal of valuable water, when he developed the filter-pressing process using a Dehne filter press,[3][4] already in use in Queensland in the extraction of sugar from macerated cane.

[2] While manager of Golden Horseshoe Estates Ltd. he was mentor to up-and-coming metallurgists at the Kalgoorlie School of Mines, with whom he developed techniques for treating gold tellurides.