The numbers tell part of it. For every dollar of profit the Panguna mine generated, the national government of Papua New Guinea received twenty cents. Of that twenty cents, the people of Bougainville - on whose land the mine sat, whose rivers it poisoned, whose villages its roads displaced - received between half a cent and one and a quarter cents. The operator of that mine was Bougainville Copper Limited, a subsidiary of the Australian arm of the global mining giant Rio Tinto. BCL's story is not really about copper. It is about what happens when a frontier mining operation confronts a people who eventually decide that the arithmetic does not work.
Bougainville Copper Limited was incorporated to run a single asset: the vast copper-and-gold orebody discovered in the Crown Prince Range in the late 1960s. Its parent was Conzinc Rio Tinto of Australia, itself a subsidiary of what is today the Rio Tinto Group. BCL began production at Panguna in 1972. The mine was so large that for a period it was the biggest open-pit copper-gold operation on Earth, generating twelve percent of Papua New Guinea's gross domestic product and more than forty-five percent of its export revenue. The profits were not an abstraction - they helped finance Papua New Guinea's transition to independence in September 1975. Rio Tinto held a controlling 53.8 percent of BCL shares for decades. The company was listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, headquartered offshore, and its directors lived far from the mountain that generated their dividends.
Before the mine even opened, the people of Bougainville were telling Canberra that the compensation arrangement was wrong. In the late 1960s, while the island was still under Australian colonial administration of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea, local landowners tried to force a better deal. Australian External Territories Minister Charles Barnes was accused of telling the Bougainvilleans they would get nothing. The dispute reached the High Court of Australia. The court found that the compensation offered was indeed inadequate by ordinary federal Australian law - but ruled that Papua New Guinea, as an External Territory, was not guaranteed those same standards. The case is a small monument to a particular kind of colonial logic: your claim is valid, but you are not the kind of subject whose claims the law protects. The mine opened anyway. The royalty structure - 20 percent to the national government, 0.5 to 1.25 percent to Bougainville - survived into the 1980s and became the central grievance when the island erupted.
In 2010, Dr Kristian Lasslett of the University of Ulster published findings based on interviews with BCL executives and access to internal company documents from the civil war years. His research described a company that, after acts of industrial sabotage at the mine, had pressed the Papua New Guinea government to send in its security forces. The same research described BCL allegedly providing those forces with trucks, fuel, accommodation, communications equipment, storage, messing facilities and office resources - even after concerns about human rights abuses had become apparent. A former BCL chairman denied the allegations. Lasslett maintained they were documented. The research did not answer every question, but it reframed a narrative the company had long told about itself: that it had simply operated a mine and been caught up in someone else's war. Whatever the truth of any particular allegation, the research made clear that the line between a mining company and a national military operation had, on Bougainville, become difficult to find.
BCL lost the mine in 1989 when Francis Ona and the Bougainville Revolutionary Army shut it down. The ten-year conflict that followed killed more than twenty thousand people. BCL's personnel withdrew by 24 March 1990 and the mine has not reopened since. For a quarter of a century after that, BCL continued to exist as a shell - a company on the Australian Securities Exchange whose primary asset was a tenement it could not work on an island it could not visit. On 30 June 2016, Rio Tinto transferred its 53.8 percent shareholding to the Autonomous Bougainville Government and the Independent State of Papua New Guinea. The exit was almost free - Rio simply gave the shares away. In June 2020 the Human Rights Law Centre in Melbourne filed a complaint with the Australian government over the environmental legacy at Panguna, including copper, zinc and mercury in the surrounding rivers. Rio Tinto has declined to fund remediation, arguing it complied with the laws in force when it was mining.
By the late 2010s, BCL was trying to come back. In 2017, Bougainville's president John Momis publicly supported reopening the mine as a source of independent funding for an island preparing for an independence referendum under the 2001 peace agreement. But the landowners who would have to approve any new licence were not convinced. In January 2018, the Autonomous Bougainville Government imposed an indefinite moratorium on renewing BCL's exploration licence. Momis warned that moving forward with BCL could cause a total explosion of the situation again - meaning, plainly, another war. The moratorium was a rare moment of institutional memory: the government saying, in effect, that some actors carry too much history to return. BCL responded in February 2018 by suing the Autonomous Bougainville Government over the licence cancellation. A company that had once claimed the ground was now arguing in court for the right to try again.
The Panguna mine complex that BCL operated sits in the Crown Prince Range at roughly 6.32°S, 155.50°E, central Bougainville. The disturbed ground and tailings plume down the Jaba River drainage are visible from altitude in clear conditions. Nearest operational airport is Aropa (IATA KIE, ICAO AYIQ) on the east coast near Kieta. Expect tropical convection to build over the central mountains from mid-morning; morning approaches offer the best visibility.