I've forgotten now when I started my Bougainville Copper Project website in memory of the many thousands of men who built the Bougainville Copper mine and the most life-changing job I've ever had. Going by my copyright message at the bottom of the page, it must've been in 2003 which is now a whole fourteen years ago.
I started off the website by inviting comments and stories from all the oldtimers who had actually built the mine, either with slide rule and pen or by sheer brawn, asking them, "Did you spend some time on the Bougainville Copper Project in the sixties and seventies? If you did, we want to hear from you! There aren't many of us left and it would be good to hear from those who lived with us in the camps or in Arawa or Kieta and shared with us the experience." Many replied - click here.
One of the first to heed the call was Chris, a Canadian from British Columbia, who wrote, "Hello, Just stumbled upon your site. Name is Chris and I lived and worked at Loloho assembling the drying plant. Lived at Camp 1 for a short while, but for the most part Loloho. Worked there from 1969 to Jan. '72 when I got the hell out to save my neck! Canadian and worked for MKF and Johns & Waygood. I don't have many more photos for the reason that the 'Pella' who was running the mail truck from Kieta, at that time, thought it was really fun to toss the mail out the window and watch it flutter away like the little birds, so a lot of us lost a considerable amount of correspondence and, of course, my return photos. Nothing surprising about that behavior, but doesn't help old memory lane. When I left Bougainville, I went to then Burma to work for Toshiba on a hydro project and there I was most definitely not permitted to even have a camera, (Vietnam time), so only memories there too. I would not trade my time in those places for anything; especially Bougainville, the Islands and Papua. Don't know that I would go back, given the opportunity, hard to say, and the likelihood of having that opportunity is little to none, so no point in conjecture. I don't know if this info is of any use to you, but there it is. Contact me if you have anything that you think that may interest me. Chris. P.S. As an aside, I see that they are talking of re-opening. Are they going to throw us a party to show us their appreciation for the good job we did of putting it together? I'm still wearing a damned hard hat and still busting my butt. What the hell have I done wrong?"
Although we had worked on the Bougainville Copper Project at about the same time and had even lived in the same camp, we'd never met there, and yet we seemed to have so much more in common than just Bougainville that it was as if we had known each other all our lives. I had only ever met one other Canadian who had been my neighbour in Camp 1 and was one of the most genuine guys I had ever come across, but Chris seemed to trump even him, and so an almost daily email exchange ensued which intensified with the coming of WhatsApp.
We both had led something of a "messy" single life before settling down, often looking back and wondering how things might have panned out had we come to our senses sooner. Then the unthinkable happened and Chris's wife passed away. When we are still young and healthy and strong, both physically and mentally, we seem to vastly overestimate our capability to live on our own. It must've come as a surprise to Chris as well just how much he missed his wife, because soon after that he was hospitalised, came back home, was hospitalised again, and came home again. Then a short message, "In hospital again fighting to stay alive. Not much interest in email or WhatsApp." That was on 31 July.
From the two blue ticks against my WhatsApp messages I knew that he was still reading them, but then finally, on 4 August, this last message:
Things mustn't have improved because there were no more blue ticks against my messages. It's been a fortnight since then. I still hope that, Mark Twain-like, I will one day receive a message from him that reads, "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated".
