Professor Mel Davies serves as an Honorary Research Fellow in the Economics discipline within the UWA Business School at the University of Western Australia. Following his retirement at the end of 2007 after 37 years of teaching, he continues to engage in research and academic contributions. His career trajectory includes serving as a Tutor in the Department of Economics at the University of Adelaide from 1971 to 1975, followed by positions at UWA as Senior Tutor in Economics from 1976 to 1981, Lecturer from 1982 to 1998, and Senior Lecturer from 1998 to 2007. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Kent and a Master of Arts from the University of Adelaide. Davies received funding from the Reserve Bank of Australia for research on Australian financiers during his early career.

As an economic historian, Mel Davies' research interests span demography, development, social history, British economic history, and nineteenth-century South Australian history, with primary emphasis on mining history. His studies focus on South Australian copper mining at sites like the Burra Burra Mines, covering liquidity problems, financial resolutions, capital, industrial relations, copper smelting, road and shipping transportation, and Western Australian gold mining finance and capitalisation. Key publications include 'Australian Mining as an Engine of Growth and Development' (2014) in Historia de la Mineria, 'Financing the Burra Burra Mines, South Australia: Liquidity Problems and Resolutions' (2010) as a UWA Economics Discussion Paper, and 'Maintaining Liquidity: Financial Problems and Their Resolution at the Burra Burra Mines, South Australia in the Nineteenth Century' (2007). He has presented papers at national and international conferences, delivered invited lectures and seminars from 1970 to 2007, and organized conferences on economic and mining history. A founder member of the Australian Mining History Association, he has served over 15 years as Secretary and Treasurer, and as editor of the Journal of Australasian Mining History and its quarterly newsletter. Davies coordinated international mining history congresses from 1998, including events in Guanajuato, Mexico (1998), Milos, Greece (2000), Hokkaido, Japan (2003), Bhubaneswar, India (2007), and was elected Secretary for the 2009 congress in Redruth, Cornwall. He collaborates with mining history scholars in the UK, Canada, South America, South Africa, and the USA. Current projects encompass a biography of mining entrepreneur Claude Albo de Bernales and papers on John Benjamin Graham and early Burra Burra challenges.

Professional Email: mel.davies@uwa.edu.au