News

April 17, 2008

Regency Mines Takes The Kokoda Trail To A Man-Sized Nickel Project

By Alastair Ford

“It’s a real man-sized project”, says Regency Mines chairman Andrew Bell of his company’s Mambare nickel laterite project in Oro province, Papua New Guinea. It’d better be, because it’s located in man-sized country. It was up on the ridges of the Owen Stanley Range, the highest peak of which punches through 4,000 metres, and just a stone’s throw away from Mambare, that the Australian army fought one of its most famous battles of all time, and checked the advancing Japanese at Kokoda. It was a battle famed for the extreme conditions under which it was fought. The days up there are hot, the nights are cold, the rain is torrential, and the potential for disease is almost unlimited. At the battle’s end, one officer of the distinguished 39th Battalion referred to it as the Australian Thermopylae.

The key supply line on the Australian side was the Kokoda Trail, which runs back down from the old mining districts in the hills - opened up in the 1890s - to Port Moresby, the capital. This is also Regency’s key supply line, and although the extremes the company faces are on the mild side compared with those faced by the soldiers who fought Australia’s coming of age battle, it’s not been an easy logistical exercise working up there. Last year a typhoon hit the region, and the road...