Qualla: Mining in Papua New Guinea

Mining in Papua New Guinea: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Until 1970, Papua New Guinea barely mined anything. Fifty years later, mining is so central to the country's economy that it can feel like the rest is decoration. The transformation has made fortunes - in Toronto, Melbourne, and Port Moresby - and it has poisoned the Fly River for hundreds of kilometres, closed a copper mine through civil war, and taught a generation of village landowners that signing a piece of paper can mean the loss of everything. The story of mining in Papua New Guinea is not one story. It is the Ok Tedi spill and the Porgera killings. It is Bougainville. It is Lihir's geothermal wells and Hidden Valley's tailings dam. It is, above all, the people whose villages sit on top of the gold and copper that the world wants.

Mining in Papua New Guinea: Before the Rush

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Germans knew there was gold in the mountains. So did the prospectors who arrived from Australia between the wars - men who panned Edie Creek in 1926 and started the first real gold rush, five kilometres from a place called Wau. They flew their equipment in on Junkers tri-moto...

Mining in Papua New Guinea: Ok Tedi and the Fly

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Mount Fubilan, in the Star Mountains near the Indonesian border, was a peak made mostly of ore. In the 1980s, engineers began to tear it down. The Ok Tedi Mine became the country's largest copper operation, producing 202,277 tonnes of copper in 2003 alone. The environmental cost ...

Mining in Papua New Guinea: Panguna and the War

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Bougainville Copper opened the Panguna mine in 1972, and for a time it was one of the largest copper-gold mines in the world - the foundation of PNG's independence economy. It was also on Bougainville, a culturally distinct island that had never entirely accepted being governed f...

Mining in Papua New Guinea: The Gold Islands

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The two largest gold mines in PNG both sit in unlikely places. Porgera, at the head of a high valley in Enga Province, has produced millions of ounces for Barrick Gold since 1990 - alongside persistent allegations of human-rights abuses by mine security against local Ipili people...

Mining in Papua New Guinea: Who Benefits

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Ramu nickel mine in Madang Province produces a modern kind of ore - a hydroxide slurry pumped through 135 kilometres of pipeline from the highlands to a processing plant on Basamuk Bay. It is owned by a Chinese state-owned company. In 2019, a spill at Basamuk turned the bay r...