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-motors and flew the ore out the same way, because there were no roads. The gold fields gave Australia a foothold in the Mandated Territory of New Guinea and gave the Kamindo people a sudden vocabulary of intrusion. But this was all small scale. Before 1970, total mineral extraction in the territory was trivial compared to what came next. The real mines - the ones that would reshape the country - needed helicopters, bulldozers, international finance, and a government willing to trade land concessions for royalty percentages that, in hindsight, looked small.

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 was catastrophic. The mine discharged its tailings directly into the Ok Tedi River, which fed the Fly - a river that drains much of western PNG. Sedimentation increased five to tenfold. Dissolved copper poisoned the inner floodplains. Fish died, gardens died, the forest along the riverbanks began to die back as the river itself rose above its natural channel and flooded the lowland forest. By 2000, a class action brought by downstream villagers forced operator BHP to set aside hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation and exit the project. The mine continued under government ownership. The Fly continued to run with sediment the colour of the milk in weak tea.

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 from Port Moresby. Landowners received a fraction of what the company earned. Tailings fouled the Jaba River. By the late 1980s, frustration had curdled into insurgency. In May 1989, the Bougainville Revolutionary Army forced Rio Tinto's subsidiary to suspend operations. The civil war that followed killed an estimated ten to fifteen thousand people before ending in 2001. The mine has never reopened. Talks have continued intermittently since 2014, but the Autonomous Bougainville Government, landowners, and the national government still cannot agree on terms. The pit is slowly filling with rainwater. A jungle is growing back over the haul roads.

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. Lihir, on a volcanic island off New Ireland, holds one of the world's largest epithermal gold deposits at 46 million ounces, hot enough that the operation powers itself partly with a 50-megawatt geothermal plant tapping steam from the vents beneath the pit. Misima Island, in the Louisiades, ran a mine for sixteen years before Barrick closed it in 2004 and rehabilitated the site - a relatively rare success story. Artisanal miners still pan the tailings. At Hidden Valley in Morobe, Kainantu in the highlands, and Woodlark in Milne Bay, smaller operations continue to write smaller versions of the same ledger: royalties, employment, tailings, complaint.

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 red and provoked demonstrations. In 2022, the mine produced 34,302 tonnes of nickel. Papua New Guinea holds extraordinary mineral wealth - gold, copper, silver, nickel, cobalt, and, beneath the Bismarck Sea, a seafloor sulphide deposit called Solwara 1 that would have been the world's first deep-sea mine had the project not collapsed financially in 2019. The nation exports these minerals. Foreign companies dominate the processing. Royalties flow to the state. Landowner associations receive payments that look substantial on paper and feel inadequate on the ground. The question the country has been asking since Edie Creek - who benefits from the wealth buried under other people's villages - has not been answered.