Two pithy sayings come to mind;
'Where there's a will there's a way! and Follow the money trail!'
I think several or many old-timers made similar remarks after Kennecott got BHP interested in mining the mountain with a golden cap ie Ok Tedi. I recall there were many who preferred the construction of a highway to the gold that would be an extension of the Okuk Highway. This was dismissed as being too costly and would have been through very difficult terrain. Today we are seeing the road from Tabubil to Telefomin being constructed.
(There is an incredible video on YouTube showing the construction of a road the Indonesian got courtesy of Freeport's Grasberg mine. Unbelievable feat of engineering.)
Having huge financial resources BHP ignored the wisdom of experienced and decided to go for the Fly River being its major supply route. That of course has its own delta problems with the shifting mud and sands. Secondly just like the Aramia River (aka Debili) at Kawito in the Gogodala where I lived for some years there is a bar across the Fly downstream of Kiunga which they use as their port. So as they had been told: some dry seasons the larger sized vessels would not be able to navigate over it. There have been several years when this has happened since the 1984 start of production.

A query for my readers. I used a small coastal/river vessel to occasionally move cargo from my bulk store at Kawito to Pangoa in Lake Murray, Suki or Kaviananga near Obo on the Fly and up the Mai Kassa to reach my store at Arufe.
The Captain and owner I understood was Derek. I would like to know what was the boat's name and what was Derek's surname and any bio anyone knows of him. I would expect many Western-hands and old colleagues like Dic 'Skunge' Randolph would know him.

Finally I wasn't sure of the spelling of the river to Arufe and searched for it. I was linked (as usual) to an interesting article of to the Royal Geographical Society titled:
18750907 Discovery of the Mai-Kassa, or Baxter River, New Guinea by Ocatvius C Stone FRGS at www.docslib.org/doc/10680256/discovery-of-the-mai-kassa-or-baxter-river-new-guinea-author-s-octavius-c
Worth an enjoyable read and full of little snippets about a voyage of the SS Ellengowan owned by the New Guinea Mission (branch of London Missionary Society)

As anyone who has lived in the Gulf region of Papua would be well aware, those water are pretty damned shallow along most of the coastline and are regarded as being the graveyard of many ships past.

Got stuck once in the early morn on a sandbank off the mouth of the Kikoro River with huge waves smashing over the stern as the skipper on the government work boat tried to ease his craft off the obstacle.

Thought we were all doomed as I and my fellow passenger trod across the waterlogged cabin to seek refuge in the wheelhouse only to find the skipper, worried that his passengers might panic, had instructed his crew to lock the stern door.

Quite an ordeal as we sat on our bunks waiting to hear the final burst of power as the boat finally extracted itself from its stranglehold and returned to the deeper channels running along the coastline.

Now that skipper had been plying those water for well over 20 years yet was easily misled by the ever changing push and shove of those treacherous waters of the Gulf.

Whoever is thinking of taking naval boats down that way might have to give serious thought to undertaking some massive sand dredging operations.

There was a missed opportunity for PNG to develop the Gulf Province when the second LNG project was being discussed.

The provincial government was told in no uncertain terms that the province must have a stand-alone LNG operation, not just sending the product to Moresby quicksands that gobble up so much of PNG's wealth.

The local peoples' views were completely ignored and the public relations boys in Waigani managed to get for themselves the second LNG. It's called Papua LNG although the natural name would have been Gulf LNG.

The oilygarchs dismissed out of hand the feasibility of having it in Gulf Province. Their exspurts told us it was impossible for FPSO (floating production storage and offloading) vessels to be used in the Papuan Gulf.

Yet there are approximately 300 such ships operating throughout the world. Many in dangerous environments:

1) BW Pioneer, built and operated by BW Offshore, is anchored at a depth of 2,600 metres in the Gulf of Mexico.

2) In the storm prone Norwegian Sea, Aker Solutions for BP Norge can handle about 19 million cubic metres of gas per day (670,000,000 cu ft/d) and 13,500 cubic metres per day of oil. It has an 80 km long gas export pipe (data from Wikipedia).

The Gallic and Texan oil men knew far more of than the PNG government's negotiating team.

Thus Moresby continues to defy the Constitution's demand that development shall be spread equally throughout the nation and, in line with internationally accepted demands that local people have their voices heard.

If China can be a better partner for development than the PNG or Australian governments, then the Gulf people should be allowed to use the offered assistance.

This would help develop the long neglected region of mud and swamps.

I did a few years at Baimuru and, as agent for Douglas Airways, know how important the airfield was for the people of the district.

Yet then governor Chris Haiveta and his mates allowed it to be disused for 14 years (I note that Ihu's strip was closed for 19 years).

Shame on the elites who at this very moment have twitches in their arses wondering if they have managed to get back on the gravy train to Waigani.

The Gulf Province has seen a long line of fantastic proposals that have never seen the light of day. Ask senior Papua New Guinean journalist and blogger Big Pat Levo.

The last proposal I encountered was a massive Chinese oil palm project, for which I was asked to do a social mapping study and which I politely turned down.

I wouldn't be holding my breath on this latest idea, nor on the Daru proposal.

I was last in Ihu in 2014. You probably would have recognised it then Chris because nothing seemed to have changed since before 1975, except the ADC's house had been totalled and pillaged and there was nothing left except a set of steel uprights on a cement pad.

The magnificent raintree beside the council chambers was still there and probably still is.

Hey Chris, doesn't Ihu get 7 or 8 meters of rain a year and isn't the water table just under the surface?

Anyone who intends build there should check out their water wings and rubber boots. The tidal surges were also pretty high as someone told me.

I wonder if the plan might be to generate some enthusiasm and then decide to set up shop elsewhere, once the locals are hooked on the idea?

I worked as a kiap in the Gulf Province for two years (mid 1969 to mid 1971).

It was a very impoverished province then as it is now.

For this reason, any major development project is likely to be welcomed by the local people.

However, no Chinese backed development comes without strings attached and port facilities built primarily for cargo vessels can be just as easily used by military vessels.

Ihu occupies a strategically significant section of the Gulf of Papua, being adjacent to Australia's northern border. This will be exercising the minds of Australia's defence establishment which (correctly) regards any Chinese commercial initiative as necessarily being part of the long term strategic ambitions of China.

The identification of areas designated for army and navy bases in the plans for the new development is inconsistent with declarations that there is no military aspect to it.

Lying, obfuscation and diversion is part of the well established Chinese strategy to attempt to confuse or misdirect its putative enemies as to its real intentions. What is being said about this development clearly fits that category.

This strategy has been successfully applied in the South China Seas where China repeatedly and vociferously denied that it was building military bases on contested atolls which we now know was always a lie.

In a similar way, the Russians successfully deceived and misdirected most of the rest of the world about its intentions towards Ukraine, persistently maintaining that it was not planning to invade that country until the moment it actually did so.

So successful was this strategy that even when the CIA and British Intelligence Service repeatedly warned Europe about what was to happen most of its leadership simply refused to believe it. They thought, wrongly, that Vladimir Putin was a 'rational actor' who would not embark upon such a risky and costly endeavour.

Thus when trying to interpret the intentions of the world's authoritarian powers it is important to understand the nature and intent of their strategic lying, which is part of what military planners call the 'non-kinetic warfare' which these powers have been using for some years now. This includes cyber warfare, economic warfare and the use of bribery to subvert and then exert control over susceptible political leaders.

This is why Australia has viewed developments in the Solomons with such concern. Deals done with China, especially if accompanied by politicians acquiring sudden and unexplained wealth, will inevitably be part of a non kinetic warfare strategy.

While I would hope that the proposed development is to the benefit of the people of Ihu and the Gulf more generally, my fear is that they will come to rue the day that Chinese developers effectively took over control of a significant part of their land.