Not so far north of this site, at Ok Tedi in Papua, New Guinea, BHP were at that time engaged in a long-running legal dispute with the indigenous population over massive environmental damage caused by mining operations, with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. This dispute was being reported regularly in the Australian press, and the company’s failure to reach agreement on compensation was causing a serious public relations crisis. The BHP sponsorship of an “Aboriginal” house was a form of counter-publicity, an investment in some potent symbolic capital.