A backgrounder on a little Aussie miner with a colonial name
Gerry van Klinken
Far East Gold is one of just a few Australian mining companies still in Indonesia. It holds two prospects in Australia – both in Queensland – but four in Indonesia. Floated on the share market in March 2022, its share price has been sliding in 2025, as it has no mines actually producing. The auditing firm KPMG stated in mid-2024 there existed ‘material uncertainties which may cast doubt on the Group’s ability to continue as a going concern‘ (p73 of FEG’s annual report, 30 June 2024). But it continues to explore its prospects while looking for well-endowed partners. Late in 2024 a subsidiary of the big Chinese company Inner Mongolia Xingye Silver and Tin Mining invested some millions of dollars, much of that conditional on FEG gaining permissions to proceed.
Its stock market announcements are most animated about a large prospect in Papua that it calls its Idenburg Project (perhaps continuing the colonial naming theme). Located in the hills 100km south of Jayapura, the gold in Keerom regency has been known by artisinal miners since the late 1990s. Its regent announced a sizable deposit in 2006, saying he was looking for an investor who he hoped would raise income for the region. He added a warning: he would do everything to prevent the destruction that happened at Freeport. ‘We do not want society to become the victim of the miners as happened at Mimika [the Freeport town]’, he said.
FEG’s other ‘high-value asset’ is in Trenggalek regency, East Java. The prospects in several promising locations within a large concession area there have been investigated in some detail (see maps here). It bought the asset from earlier owners. Among the predecessors was the Australian company ARC Exploration, mentioned frequently in Lian Sinclair’s book on anti-mining resistance in Indonesia. FEG blames the protests against mining in Trenggalek on earlier owners. Its chief executive officer told the press in 2022: ‘Unfortunately, it had some issues with previous owners upsetting the local community before one of the joint venture partners took over and didn’t do a very good job either.’ He claimed this had now all been ‘cleaned up.’ The articles by Yayum Kumai and Jhe Mukti in this edition discuss this claim from the point of view of Trenggalek locals.
In 2025 FEG finally plans to start drilling in Trenggalek regency - two holes in Sumber Bening village (also spelled Sumberbening), two in Singgahan hamlet (Sawahan village, Watulimo subdistrict), and no less than 14 in Buluroto hamlet (Ngadimulyo village, Kampak subdistrict). As mentioned in earlier plans, the latter may extend into Sentul hamlet, next-door to Buluroto but part of Karangrejo village in the same subdistrict.
In need of cash to develop its assets, FEG teamed up for Trenggalek with the Eurasian Resources Group. This company is owned by a trio of Kazakh oligarchs and the Republic of Kazakhstan. It was taken off the stock market in 2013 when its share price fell amidst an ongoing investigation by the UK Serious Fraud Office. The company has experience with the business of mining in the global South: it has assets in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique and Mali.
FEG’s other prospects are near Wonogiri in Central Java (a low-grade deposit that is only viable with high gold prices), and in the Woyla regency in the west of Aceh, near the town of Meulaboh. Like all FEG’s Indonesian assets, both have been owned by other companies. Woyla was abandoned by an Indonesian miner many years ago, after which thousands of illegal small miners moved in. Unconcerned with any regulations, they chopped down the rainforest and spilled their mercury into the river.
FEG understandably talks up all these prospects in its ASX reports – it will want to see good cash whether it actually develops them or decides to sell them on instead. It says the Indonesian government ranks Trenggalek ‘one of the top three priority greenfield gold projects in the country.’ The geology of Trenggalek is said to be similar to that of two equally rich mines further east: Tumpang Pitu also in East Java, and Batu Hijau in Sumbawa. A map that appears on many FEG publications explains what causes the similarity between these widely spaced mine sites: the Sunda Magmatic Arc. Plate tectonics have created a line of volcanoes stretching right along the Indonesian archipelago. Mineral-rich fluids associated with volcanism in the past have left behind ‘porphyry’ and ‘epithermal’ deposits containing commercially interesting concentrations of gold, copper, silver, and other metals. A similar map for the Idenburg Project links that with a chain of gold and copper mines extending throughout neighbouring Papua New Guinea, including Ok Tedi and Porgera.
While clearly meant to pique investor interest, these comparisons might be read differently by those to be impacted by the new mines FEG intends to open. People in Papua have long been familiar with Freeport – but they also know what happened across the border in PNG. In his book Law and order in a weak state (2001), Sinclair Dinnen writes that Porgera and Ok Tedi not only failed to improve local people’s lives but contributed to political instability: ‘The unfulfilled promise of Papua New Guinea’s mineral wealth provides the broad context for increasing frustration and resentment at local levels. The Bougainville crisis has provided the most dramatic, but by no means the only, example of these growing tensions.’
Back in the Sunda Magmatic Arc, Batu Hijau, like many such mines, has been dumping as much as 120,000 tons of rock waste each day into Senunu Bay since December 1999. The Tumpang Pitu mine, meanwhile, has sparked waves of popular resistance – as discussed by Wahyu Eka Styawan in this edition of Inside Indonesia. The threat of a chain of for-ever holes in the ground stretching the length of Indonesia’s most populous islands of Java and Sumatra could well spread the alarm.
Gerry van Klinken (gvanklinken@gmail.com) is a historian of Southeast Asia. His initial training was in geology and geophysics, and he worked in mineral exploration for a time. He now lives in Brisbane (where FEG is also based).
