ABSTRACT
Large-scale mining enterprises have been important in Papua New Guinea since colonial times. One of the effects of Leahy’s enterprise was that he paid the local people with shell valuables for their laboring work, thereby altering the forms of circulation of wealth and the acquisition of status. The Leahy brothers were associated with the Australian administration’s field officer, James Taylor. Taylor led a party far into what later became the Enga Province of Papua New Guinea; and he subsequently established a gold property license at Porgera. The anthropologist who has done the most long-term committed study of one of the peoples most affected by the riverine pollution from the mine, the Yonggom of Dome village, Stuart Kirsch, documented in 1996 the massively ruinous effects of the mine tailings and sediment.
