The Destruction

The Destruction - Further Context

Production at the Panguna mine began in April 1972. As many local communities predicted in the 1960s, its environmental, socio-cultural and psychological impacts were seismic. For apologists, the mine’s deleterious effects have been portrayed as the ‘environmental’ toll which communities had to pay in order to accrue benefits from a new way of life embedded fundamentally in the relationships of capitalism, with its associated dynamics of industrialisation, urbanisation and consumerism. To remedy particular impacts on customary landholdings, Rio Tinto’s subsidiary Bougainville Copper Limited paid compensation levels above the mandatory minimum set out in legislation, and delivered other benefits designed to uplift the population, so the argument goes.

This series examines, from the perspective of impacted communities, the injustice of this forced ‘transaction’, where heritage and culture had to be sacrificed for a set of objectives originally authored by the colonial powers. The loss of land and the destruction of environment, could never find commensurate expression in money or in-kind benefits, landowners argue. Accordingly, as mine impacted communities faced a growing social dystopia, this series outlines how its members suffered feelings of disorientation, alienation and trauma. People also began to express social outrage at local figures who had been coopted into this destructive process through the lures of money, business and white-collar employment.

Even at a base statistical level, the mine’s physical impact was enormous. The ore body was extracted by conventional open cut methods, employing electric shovels and 100-150 tonne trucks. Approximately 100,000 tonnes of waste rock was extracted per day. It was transported to dumps in the headwaters of the Kawerong Valley. Another 100,000 tonnes of ore rock was extracted daily and sent to the concentrator. Five per cent of this rock was turned into a concentrate slurry which was pumped to the east coast of Bougainville for export overseas, while the remaining 95 per cent formed a waste known as tailings, which was pumped into the Jaba river. By 1988, 300 000 tonnes of ore and waste rock were being removed from the mine on a daily basis, resulting in even greater volumes of waste. The Kawerong valley became a wasteland, and the Jaba river became twenty times wider.

Yet the mine’s impact cut deeper than this. The mine represented in a particularly visceral and dystopian form nature’s subordination to the objective of profit (capital accumulation), articulating a wider western attitude of mankind’s right to master nature and exploit its riches to the point of exhaustion, for transient forms of wealth (see series two). This was experienced locally as a particularly gross and irresponsible approach to the management of the relation between human communities and the natural world; contrasting notably with civilisations indigenous to Bougainville, which have emphasized balance with nature, and the custodianship of resources, as both a deeply personal ethic, and a responsibility to future generations. Within matrilineal tenure systems that dominated the mine area, women were the most visible agents of this philosophical stance.

However, it would be simplistic to juxtapose a homogenous Western creed which railed against unified local resistance. The abuse of nature for wealth in its ephemeral monetary form, has been resisted globally, through diverse social and revolutionary movements. Equally, the imposition of destructive extractive enterprises on the Global South has found local adherents prepared to act as champions for nascent capitalist systems, convincing their compatriots of its merits and necessary nature.

These complex fault-lines were evident in Bougainville, as ‘independent’ national and provincial governments in 1975 assumed ownership of a colonial project introduced by the Australian administration. Bougainville’s North Solomons Provincial Government proved an efficient and adept vehicle for stimulating attitudes, skills, capacities, economic practices, and political currents, that could see communities immerse themselves in a new way of life compatible with a global capitalist economy. This would need to be a gentle and gradual process if resistance was to be diffused.

However, such a luxury was impossible in the mine impacted areas, where the transition was turbulent and rapid, thus creating for the North Solomons Provincial Government, and their national government colleagues, an acute challenge.

They had allies in the mine impacted communities – principally, a small but influential group of men, who had accumulated wealth through businesses, white-collar employment and other benefits linked to the mine.

On the other hand, there was a sizable body of people who experienced their dual existence as proud custodians of a land and culture on the one hand, and on the other an employee or beneficiary of the mine associated economy, as a deeply felt crisis of conscience. Some sensed they needed to atone for their role through joining a growing body of resistance against the mine, which was steadily growing in size, a dynamic further explored in series four.

Slowly the seeds germinated in the 1960s were taking root, and preparing the ground for a more violent process of confrontation.