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The heavy gold is attracted to the silver mercury, which is then filtered through a syringe and finally burned off to reveal the gold.Įven the smallest exposure to mercury can be harmful, especially for pregnant women like Rachael. Sylvester demonstrates how they extract the gold with the mercury: a kind of bush alchemy done right by what's left of the Kavarong River. We talk to Rachael and Sylvester for a while and we meet a local gold buyer who has a tiny plastic pot that he opens to reveal granules of gold: 250 grams' worth, in fact about $AU9,000 - a small fortune that he is just carrying around casually in his woven billum bag.
#THIS WAR OF MINE RADIO SKIN#
Like most Bougainvilleans, she has the darkest of black skin and her mouth is stained bright red by betel nut, chewed for a mild buzz that comes with regular spitting of crimson goop. Rachael Meara is nine months' pregnant but still out there shovelling and sifting with her husband, Sylvester. Luckily, though, the very first person we talk to perfectly illustrates the story I'm hoping to tell - about the dangers of using mercury to extract gold. But on the day we visited it was raining and there were only a handful of people shovelling gravel through sluices. I'd been told that each day about 1,000 people go to the tailings to find gold. It's there, on the moonscape of the tailings, we go to find gold miners: family operations sifting through the river sand for gold dust. There's a small community who live around the wide, empty streets of town and many more in the tailings area, which looks like a glacier of crushed rock spewing out of the mine, widening to cover two rivers and reaching as far as the ocean kilometres away. While it might feel like a ghost town, Panguna is far from deserted. But the oversized trucks have been chopped up and sold as scrap metal by a Chinese company. I've seen this in photos: it's a neat visual shorthand for the abandoned mine. I want to get a shot of the yellow trucks lined up at the bottom of the pit. We drive to the edge of the open-cut mine, which is hard to say how many football fields across. A giant digger sits on the side of the road, its once-yellow paint rusting like the slowest sunset, weeds growing around its enormous scoop. The apartment blocks that housed the mine's workers are burnt-out shells. But Panguna shut down in 1989, the beginning of a slide into civil war on Bougainville.Īnd it's like time stopped then - except for the steady decay of concrete and the creep of the rich jungle. My guide used to work at the mine and speaks sort of proudly, as if we were driving through a fully functioning mining operation. "That's the light vehicle maintenance area," he says, gesturing to a falling-down shed, "and that's the office." LIAM COCHRANE: Driving through the abandoned Panguna mine is surreal enough, but the commentary from my local guide amplifies the weirdness.
![this war of mine radio this war of mine radio](https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2017/09/01/finch_screen1_sq-2ba5dc99d4540ba013a125ee83731dad8038b071-s800-c85.jpg)
The mine itself is still technically a no-go zone, guarded by a militia roadblock, but that could be about to change. The autonomous island to the east of mainland PNG was the scene of a civil war during the 90s, sparked by conflict over the Australian-owned Panguna mine.
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ELIZABETH JACKSON: Our Papua New Guinea correspondent, Liam Cochrane, has recently spent some time in Bougainville.