It's all so far away now and such a long time ago and yet, on a hot and humid day like today, it's easy to imagine that I am back on tropical Bougainville Island. I lived and worked there when the roads and the living conditions and the people I worked alongside were a lot rougher than as shown in this later "induction video".
To those of us who built this mine, either with our bodies or our brains, Bougainville was our home during the construction phase of the mine, and it came in the shape of a 9x9ft donga, tastefully decorated with PLAYBOY centrefolds of girls waxed to the point of martyrdom, and a 2ft-wide metal locker which easily held all our worldly possessions, with our needs for comfort satisfied by a red plastic chair on the porch.
Camp 6 Loloho
Click on image to enter the Bougainville Copper Project website
As for other things, our regular ten-hour working days six days a week and rumours about the stuff they put into our tea kept our minds of it.
Would I do it again? Only if I could also be sixty years younger again!
