This is life on Tanami mine – one of the most remote mines in the world.

Yet this doesn’t stop thousands of people flying into it for work every day.

Operated by Newmont since 2002, the mine sits in the Northern Territory’s Barkly region.

Alice Springs is 550 km away, Yuendumu is 270km, and Darwin is more than 1000km away.

On average, 500 attributable Koz of gold is produced each year from the mine, pumping millions of dollars annually into the Northern Territory economy.

Onsite, the Tanami Desert surrounds the mine, yet inside is a mix of characters from all over Australia – and the world – who call this place home.

Wet mess, hot mouths

On Monday nights Tanami’s toughest congregate in the wet mess to see who can handle the most heat, in a night full of spice.

Hosted by Aaron ‘Taco’ Hargreaves from the Darwin Chilli Company, eight willing contestants are tested in a chilli eating contest to see who can handle a Scoville scale-busting burn.

For those brave enough to step up, a care package of milk and other cooling condiments are placed in front of them – but aren’t allowed to be used to cool the burn – as they test themselves with jalapeños through to Carolina reapers.

Organised by ever-energetic The Granites social club secretary Lyn Ris, the night was originally going to be a hotdog eating competition – before a decision was made to go to “the next level”.

“We went up four levels of heat,” she said.

“So they had to chew, chew, chew. Once they finished chewing, they had to hold it for two minutes.”

Ms Ris said the competition was tight – with two sweating winners crowned – in what was the first of more to come.

There will be three more chilli eating competitions held, she said, with a potential finals event to crown the “desert chilli champion”.

“The problem that we have is the rosters,” she said.

“So if we can get those top people – say it is two from each round, we have eight contestants, and we do take it to a higher level – of course, if they agree to be part of it, there is no reason why the leadership team wouldn’t try and accommodate that with additional flights and whatever for people to stay.

“Newmont are good to support things like that, so it’s something most definitely that we’d love to do.”

For a remote mine, the social club is a means for people to feel less isolated – something which was important when you were surrounded by desert, Ms Ris said.

“There’s nowhere to go, so this is home, and this becomes people’s family here,” she said.

“We’ve got some people on rosters where they do in a two and a one – so two weeks on, one week off.

“They live here more than they do in their own homes.”

Down where trucks move thousands of dollars worth of dirt

But while above ground cools down after the chilli eating competition, underground stays hot.

The average temperature underground sits around 40C in the main goldmine, where hundreds of mine workers spend the majority of their 12 hour shift.

Named Dead Bullock Soak, its tunnels are pitch black, lit only by the headlights of light or heavy vehicles which roar through.

It’s roughly a 40 minute drive to the bottom – which is 1560m down from relative surface level – with gold being mined since 1983.

Water is omnipresent inside and will drip down from the tunnel roofs, forming large puddles lower down in the shaft.

It’s sweaty business, but to underground workshop superintendent Alan Adams, once you get used to it, it’s possible to forget you’re almost 1km below surface level.

“When you’re in the workshop here, with all like the shot-created walls and stuff, it just kind of feels like a normal workshop,” he said.

“The biggest difference I suppose is the heat and obviously the darkness; getting used to having a cap lamp, getting used to carrying a self rescuer.”

With the mine having an output of 2 million ounces of gold and 6 million ounces of gold in reserve, Mr Adams has the important job of servicing the diggers and loaders working the earth to obtain the mineral.

His brightly-lit workshop looks like any other in Australia – the only difference being it’s 940m below the surface.

The walls and floors are concrete, and there’s a smoko room fashioned out of a sea container.

The environment is a far cry from the rest of the underground mine, where excavators load loose rock into dump trucks.

Driving past one, the mining manger Luke Barbetti quips that there’s about “$35k worth of dirt” in one dump truck.

With a gold output of 13.7 tonnes in 2022 to 2023 – equating to a $1.21 billion in production value – Tanami is one of the largest gold mines in Australia.

And there are plans to make it even bigger and more efficient.

The burden of a two-way radio

Leaving the tunnel, mine system superintendent Hamish Rose tries to make a radio call on the two-way in the LandCruiser.

He’s held up by three consecutive calls.

The two-way plays an integral part in underground operations in Dead Bullock Soak, as all vehicle movements have to be cleared and communicated – especially with drivers of heavy vehicles.

Exasperated, Mr Rose finally gets through, only to communicate four words: “driver, LV (light vehicle) coming through”.

Above ground, Mr Rose oversees the underground control room, which tracks the movements of all vehicles in and out of the underground mine.

He says it’s “a very challenging role”.

“It’s very demanding, because there’s 20 trucks, nine boggers (excavators), that they have to keep track of and record basically all their movements,” he said.

“So just lots of in and out data, radio calls, people coming in, working with shift supervisors to make sure the ship runs smoothly.

“They get about 3000 radio calls a day through (the control room) office. So that’s a radio call every 15 seconds.”

But new technology could help reduce the mine’s reliance on the humble two-way radio, Mr Rose said.

For the past couple of months, Newmont has been trialing a technology called Minestar in Dead Bullock Soak.

But to use it effectively, Dead Bullock Soak will need 5G connectivity.

Getting 5G underground would automate a lot of data gathering, and make life easier for the control room team, Mr Rose said.

“That’s where the future needs to be, getting good coverage underground so we can track the trucks automatically, same with the drills, same with the loaders,” Mr Rose said.

“It will take a lot of pressure off (the control room) team.

“If they’re having to answer the radio every 15 seconds, it really mentally is quite demanding, and a lot of decisions probably get missed.

“So if they can make better decisions throughout the day, we might be able to get more ore out of the ground, and it also allows them to go home at the end of shift in a better mindset.”

Expanding up to expand down

But 5G isn’t going to be the only upgrade underground – another, much bigger project is currently underway, and it expands 89m above the ground.

With 400 people working on it, the Tanami Expansion Two project is seeking to increase the amount of gold produced, and extend the life of the mine.

And to Tanami Expansion Two project director Leigh Cox, the process is really quite simple: two buckets, lifting the ore out of the ground, the exact same way a building elevator gets people from the top to the bottom floors.

“It has two large lifts that counterbalance each other. Each of them carries 28 tonnes, and 28 tonne is about the average load of a semi trailer,” he said.

“So instead of driving rock up in single truck loads, it comes up in the lift, 28 tons at a time every couple of minutes.

“It’s highly automated, and it’s all power, all electrical which gets rid of the diesel trucks off the decline (the underground tunnel).

“It improves the mine’s efficiency, reduces costs, improves safety, and, as I say, sets the mine up for the future.”

Currently, it takes a truck two hours to get from the bottom of Dead Bullock Soak to the top to unload ore.

Tanami’s expansion project seeks to keep the trucks underground, carting the rocks instead to a crusher, so they can be lifted up through the new shaft.

The project is expected to be finished in 2027, and will see between 150 to 200 koz – up to five tonnes – of additional gold pulled out of the mine per year.

Once completed, the more than 1.5km long structure ensures Tanami will keep pumping out gold until 2040, Mr Cox says.

Finding gold – with a touch of Shakespeare

When Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the 16th century, he could never have predicted that thousands of kilometres away, a pocket of the Tanami Desert would come to be known after the fairy prince in his play.

Oberon is the name of one of the exploration fields which borders the main Tanami gold mine, and sits about 600km north-west of Alice Springs.

The site is self sufficient, with its own camp and wet mess, providing the 40 workers there with hot food and cold beer after a hard day’s work.

But the desert itself is anything but deserted – recent rains have turned the landscape green, with a plethora of wildflowers in bloom, as the spinifex and saltbush cover the red dirt with their leaves.

For senior drilling geologist Jon Walters, working out at Oberon puts you at one with nature – such as camels, dingoes, or even carnivorous plants.

“Having this amazing nature and the lands that we obviously are privileged enough to work on, is an amazing place to be,” he said.

“And being so remote – we are, literally one of the most remote mines in Australia, if not the most – to be out here and working with the locals and working within the groups that we work with to be able to do the jobs that we got here is amazing.

“There’s a lot of special plants and animals that live and grow in this area.”

An 18-year mining industry veteran, Mr Walters is overseeing the search for gold in this remote part of the Tanami, where exploration drilling is underway.

Gold has been found here, he says, and if more is found it could potentially see Oberon become another gold mine in Newmonts portfolio.

“We’re basically trying to turn this area into an open cut and obviously underground mine at some stage,” he said.

Sticking with the family trade, only on the other side of the world

Exploration drilling at Oberon results in thin, metre long rock samples being sent for analysis back in the main mine at Tanami.

The “cores” – segments of drilled rock about the width of a can – are analysed by a team of geologists, one of whom inadvertently followed in her family's footsteps to do so.

American Ali Oswald said despite her father and grandfather both being geologists, it was never something she planned on pursuing,

Originally from Denver, Colorado, it was a trip to Australia and a geology degree from University of Sydney which changed things for her.

Now a project geologist at Tanami, Ms Oswald said the “unplanned route” had worked out quite well for her.

“I started with Newmont about two years and eight months ago, and I’ve just loved it,” she said.

“It’s very different in terms of climate, and then also just a really cool history

“I used to say, like, ‘Oh, I just work in the middle of the desert, middle of nowhere’, but there’s actually a really amazing cultural history in this Warlpiri area.”

For Ms Oswald, her time at Tanami has her hooked on the Territory.

“I’m even kind of having a bit of an itch to move to Darwin,” she said.

“I think, that would be really cool, because it just seems like there’s a new adventure in every corner of Australia.”

The NT News was a guest of Nemont during a visit to Tanami gold mine for three days in August.