In 1987 I answered an advert for a six-month electrical position at OK Tedi. I guess they must have been desperate as they took me. I flew to Cairns to catch the twice-weekly charter flight to Tabubil, the township for the mine. The landing was a bit frightening, with high mountains on either side and in front, as the plane entered thick clouds, which only cleared just before the wheels touched down.
Dongas, identical to those I had lived in on Bougainville Island, had second, peaked aluminum roofs over them because of the heavy rains during most afternoons. The rainfall was approx. 8000 mm a year, and when it rained it was deafening on the aluminum roof. Offices were a selection of sheds, and any communication with the outside world was mainly by fax from the main office which was just another, bigger shed.
But the food was absolutely woeful – unbelievable! Very little came in by air. Most was shipped from Australia and was still in perfect condition when it was dropped onto barges at the mouth of the Fly River. But the tug-and-barge trip, which took several days for the 800 kilometres from the mouth of the river to the small town of Kiunga (the riverport for the OK Tedi mine), usually ended in disaster. The crews were Nationals, and either the diesel generators connected to the refrigerated containers broke down or, more often, the diesel for the generator was stolen when the barge guards were asleep. In the tropical temperatures, the frozen food had defrosted long before the barges reached Kiunga, and long before being trucked up the mountain to the township of Tabubil.
The cooks did what they could, but the meat and fish were black. I never touched them. I lived on baked beans and locally baked bread for breakfast and, on alternate days, tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce. Lunch was tea and plain cake (the milk was powdered, so that was OK); dinner was tinned peaches or apricots and anything else that looked edible. Of course, there were plenty of cockroaches running around. Local vegetables caused so many cases of diarrhea that the cooks had to wash them in a weak solution of Dettol.
Because of a mix-up I found that I was assigned to the instrument section, while another new guy a couple of weeks later, who was an instrument bloke, was allocated to electrical. We suggested that we swap positions but that was too difficult, so in instrument I remained. Actually, it worked out well as the two of us in the small instrument section had to travel down to the port of Kiunga regularly. The distance from Tabubil to Kiunga was about 120 kilometres, mainly up and down hills, except for some 20 kilometres of flat before the port. The road was metalled and reasonably wide, so there was no trouble when meeting another 4WD Toyota travelling in the opposite direction.
Trucks were another story: the company’s fleet were "Pacific" trucks made in Canada , which were very rugged prime movers. These were based in Kiunga and a convoy of some eight to a dozen, all driven by locals, would leave early each morning for Tabubil or on to the mine itself, and return in the afternoon. They would drive like maniacs on the downhill sections, as knew every bump in the road, and cut every corner. Early in the morning before driving down to Kiunga, I would ring the dispatcher who would give me the number of trucks in the convoy. Driving down the mountain range, I had a rough idea where I would meet the convoy, so some distance ahead I would stop and switch off the engine, and, if I heard nothing, would continue for a bit and listen again. In the quiet mountain air, once the truck engines were heard, I would quickly get off the road by driving into a drainage ditch. If it was an uphill section, the trucks were slow, but if it was flat or downhill, they were anything but slow. First, an Isuzu truck, acting as a lead vehicle, would rush past. Then I would count the following trucks. The Isuzu maintenance truck with spare tires would make up the end of the convoy. More than once, a missing truck and no maintenance truck meant there had been a breakdown, and so I would carefully drive on and keep listening for the missing truck, which eventually would drive past me just as crazy as if it had still been part of the convoy.
After finishing my work at Kiunga, I would head back up the mountain which was just as interesting, as trucks generally returned empty and going downhill fast, so that there was still a lot more stopping and listening, and, invariably, there were also heavy afternoon rains.
When I finished my contract, even though I was offered more work on higher pay, I'd had enough. I did not go back to Australia but went to Port Moresby and then to Indonesia and on to Singapore to work there. I have never been back to PNG, and it's not on my bucket list."
After more than forty years, and now living in Malaysia and nearing his dotage, an old workmate from my years on the Bougainville Copper Project, Roy Goldsworthy, put pen to paper to write the above article. It describes his six months in 1987 at the Ok Tedi mine when it was still under construction and didn't look like anything in this corporate video:
I had come to Port Moresby in 1982 to assist in the setting-up of the tug-and-barge operation that would supply the Ok Tedi Mine - see here - just after Bechtel Corporation, who would built the mine, had arrived.
I had worked for Bechtel Corporation during the construction phase of the Bougainville Copper Project ten years before, and when it turned out that my boss from those early days, Sid Lhotka, was again in charge of the accounting side of the Ok Tedi Project, I was keen to join him.
He and I and my then wife had dinner at the Papuan Hotel in Port Moresby, where he told me that the Ok Tedi Project was so rough that they only hired single staff. For a short moment I regretted being married, but having read Roy Goldsworthy's article, I know now that it saved me from eating lots of baked beans and tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce, to say nothing of the cockroaches and the diarrhea (although I prefer "diarrhea" spelt the English way which is "diarrhoea" because it really looks like I've completely lost control of my vowels).
