The mine operates inside a volcano. Not next to one - inside one. The Luise Caldera, on the north coast of Lihir Island, is a breached crater where steam still rises from the ground and where, beneath the altered rock, one of the largest epithermal gold deposits ever found waits in quantities that have so far yielded more than 46 million ounces. Before the mine, fewer than 4,000 people lived on Lihir. The population of the Lihir Group grew from 12,570 in 2000 to an estimated 25,608 in 2011 - the kind of doubling that reshapes an island beyond recognition. The Lihirian people - Melanesian, matrilineal, speakers of a language called Lihir or Lir - now live on top of, beside, and inside a global gold mine. That is the story. The details are where it gets complicated.
Lihir is small. Twenty-two kilometres long, fourteen and a half across, a compact cluster of overlapping basaltic stratovolcanoes rising 700 metres above a sea that averages 4,800 millimetres of rainfall a year. The caldera at Luise sits open to the ocean, its cracked floor hot enough that geothermal wells produce enough steam to run a 50-megawatt power station. Before the mine, Lihirians lived where Melanesians have long lived - in coastal villages organised around clan land, matrilineal inheritance, subsistence gardens of taro and yam, and ocean fishing. Missionaries had moved some villages from inland sites to the coast in the early 20th century, but land ownership had never left clan hands. Most Lihirians are Catholic on paper and traditional in practice. The dead are important here. The men's houses are important. The mine, when it came, had to negotiate with all of that.
The Lihir Integrated Benefits Package, signed in 1995, is one of the most elaborate agreements between a mining company and an affected community ever drafted in Papua New Guinea. It promised a 50-year lease rather than an indefinite one. It promised royalties, equity, relocation houses, education benefits, a hospital, and infrastructure. It also, crucially, promised that the people of Putput and Kapit - the villages nearest the mine - would be moved with their permission and not against it. By several measures the package worked better than earlier PNG mining agreements. By other measures, the costs were substantial. Villagers moved. Family gardens were replaced by cash payments. A population that had hovered around four thousand ballooned with fly-in fly-out workers, contractors, sex workers, and settlers from elsewhere. The expatriate enclave at Londolovit, with its swimming pool and cricket pitch, became a different country from the Lihirian village a few hundred metres away.
The mine has always discharged its tailings directly into the ocean - a practice called deep-sea tailings placement, or DSTP. The reasoning is geological: the tailings pipe carries the waste down the steep volcanic flanks of the island to depths where currents are minimal and, proponents argue, the environmental effect on surface fisheries is limited. Critics point out that the ocean floor is not nothing, that Lihirian fishermen have reported declining catches, and that the sediment plume has been documented drifting from the discharge site. The mine also operates on a geothermally active caldera, which means steam-release wells must be drilled constantly to keep the pit from exploding - or, more precisely, to keep pressurised steam from finding its own way out through the rock during excavation. The mine's geothermal plant captures about a quarter of that energy as electricity. The rest vents.
Lihir Gold was listed on the Australian and PNG stock exchanges in 1995. Australian economist Ross Garnaut served as chairman for its entire independent existence. In August 2010, Newcrest Mining absorbed Lihir Gold in a 9.5-billion-dollar takeover that was approved by 99.86 percent of shareholders and briefly made Newcrest the world's fifth-largest gold producer. In 2023, Newcrest was itself acquired by the American giant Newmont for roughly 19 billion US dollars. The deed of title on the Lihir Integrated Benefits Package has changed hands twice. The Lihirian landowners negotiating with the company today are not negotiating with the company their grandparents signed with. Neither are they negotiating with the same corporate representatives, the same shareholders, or the same market conditions. The mine is now scheduled to run into the 2040s. What comes after - for the island, for the caldera, for the 25,000 people who now live in its shadow - is a question nobody has fully answered.
The largest settlement on the island is Londolovit, where most expatriate mine employees live in housing compounds with their families. There is a hospital that serves both expatriate and Lihirian communities. There are two large primary schools on the mining-impacted coast - Sekunkun Primary, on the northeast, has around 600 students and 19 teachers. There is an airstrip at Kunaye, north of Londolovit, long enough to land small jets carrying shift workers in and out on rotation. Malaria is endemic, as it is across coastal PNG. Land is still owned by clans, still passed through the female line, still unable to be sold outright - though usage rights can be granted, and the mine holds its rights on exactly those terms. On a clear day from the top of the caldera rim, you can see the volcanic peaks of the Tanga Islands to the northwest and, on the far horizon, the coast of New Ireland. The ocean is everywhere. The gold is going, a few grams at a time, into somebody's wedding ring in Mumbai or a central bank vault in Frankfurt. The Lihirians are still on the island.
Coordinates: 3.16°S, 152.58°E. Lihir Island is in the Lihir Group, about 900 kilometres northeast of Port Moresby and roughly 50 kilometres east of the southern tip of New Ireland. Kunaye Airstrip north of Londolovit handles mine rotation flights - a grass/sealed runway capable of taking small jets such as Dash-8 and Fokker F28 sizes. Best viewed from 3,000-6,000 feet to see the breached Luise Caldera on the north coast, the open-pit mine inside it, and the contrast between mined areas and the forested volcanic cones to the south. Expect visible plumes from the geothermal power station and pit steam wells. The seafloor drops steeply off the coast - the tailings discharge is offshore to the east. Weather is humid tropical with 4,800 mm annual rainfall, often cloudy; clear windows are most common in the early morning. Kavieng (AYKV) on New Ireland is the nearest major airfield, about 160 kilometres to the northwest.