Hancock Prospecting began exploration work at the Hope Downs deposits in earnest, but holding a mountain of iron and selling it are two different things. Through the 1990s and early 2000s, the company tried again and again to bring the project to life with a partner. There were talks with Fortescue, then building its own mine nearby. When attempts to use BHP's existing railway failed, the project faced an extra billion dollars to build its own rail and port. The breakthrough came in 2005, when Rio Tinto - a competitor whose roots in the Pilbara reached back to 1966 - agreed to a partnership instead. With Rio's infrastructure already in place, the costly new line became unnecessary. The mine moved into production in November 2007, decades after the ore was first found.

Hope Downs runs as an equal joint venture, ownership split down the middle between Rio Tinto and Hancock Prospecting. It is an unusual arrangement: a global mining giant and a family company, bound together over a single body of ore. Hope Downs 1 came first, in 2007. Hope Downs 4, about 30 kilometres north of Newman, delivered its first ore in 2013. The smaller Baby Hope pit followed in 2018. Together the operation now ships on the order of fifty million tonnes of iron ore a year, blended into the reddish Pilbara product that loads onto ships bound mostly for the steel mills of Asia. In 2025 the partners committed to a further expansion, Hope Downs 2, keeping ore moving as the older pits run down.

The ore does not stay long. A thirty-kilometre spur line links the mine to Rio Tinto's wider rail network, then carries the rock to the coast for loading. That spur was named the Lang Hancock Railway, after the prospector who claimed to have found the deposit - so the family signature appears twice, once on the pits and once on the track that empties them. The mountains here belong to the Hamersley Range, ancient banded ironstone laid down more than two billion years ago, when the oceans first filled with oxygen and iron rusted out of the water in vast rhythmic layers. What the haul trucks dig through is older than almost anything alive.

No one lives at Hope Downs in the ordinary sense. The workforce flies in and flies out, weeks on and weeks off, rotating between the red dust and homes hundreds of kilometres south. It is a particular Australian life: long shifts under a furnace sky, then a plane back to suburbia. The mine even seeped into the country's music. In 2018 the band Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever named their debut album Hope Downs, drawn to the phrase for what it suggested rather than what it dug - the feeling, as they put it, of standing at the edge of a great unknown and finding something to hold on to. It is an apt image for a pit: a planned and deliberate void, carved hope-first into very old stone.