Louisa Dira

4th Year geology student at University of Papua New Guinea

Denise: Where are you from originally?
Louisa: My mom is from Milne Bay Province, which is the eastern tip of Papua New Guinea, and my dad's from the Northern Province, which is adjacent to, and north west of Milne Bay.

Denise: And where did you grow up?
Louisa: I grew up mostly in Port Moresby, but every Christmas we'd fly to Papendetta or to Milne Bay.

Denise: How did they meet?
Louisa: I think they met at University of Papua New Guinea, my mom's a grade 8 teacher, but she was a secretary for a professor there at that time and my dad was a student.

Denise: So now they both live and work in Port Moresby and do you have brothers or sisters?
Louisa: Yes, I have a younger brother who is 10 years old and my sister is five years old, so there's a big gap between us.

Denise: How did you get into geology?
Louisa: Mostly just a practical thing. I'm not so interested in working in an office all of the time, so when I heard about geology that you could travel throughout PNG and get to know the environment, how things came about, because I like nature that suited me very well...after medicine. I wanted to study medicine, but I didn't get the grades because I was a bit slack, so I changed paths and geology was the next thing, and I'm really grateful because I get to be outside and meet a lot of people.

Denise: You just did your industrial training. You were in the bush...where were you?
Louisa: Yes I was in Wau in the Morobe province. I spent _ of my time in the Wau area, and the other part at this place called Hidden Valley that is at around 2,350 meters above sea-level, it's about two hours drive from Wau, up in the mountains. There's a base camp there and we spent most of our time at the camp, but when the geologists needed people to go out and survey an area for them to drill, then we would go out to map with a tape and compass.

Denise: So where you with a survey company, or who were you with?
Louisa: I was with an exploration company that had four exploration licenses around the Wau area where we would go out and map, looking at minerals and hard rock, looking for gold, silver and copper especially.

Denise: Did you ever take any samples of the sediment?
Louisa: Not so much, we were surveying, mapping and logging the drill cores that came from that area.

Denise: Did you do the drilling?
Louisa: The company employed another company to do the drilling, and we would log it. They used diamond drills to drill down. The deepest they went down in Hidden Valley was 450 meters (1,476 feet).

Denise: So where did you stay while you were there?
Louisa: The camp was made up of temporary buildings, so there were about 100 people, all men, and each person had a room. There was only one other female, my colleague.

Denise: Is this pretty common?
Louisa: Yes, our professor, Hugh Davies is trying to get more women into geology, there's only a handful in our department.

Denise: What's a memorable experience from your time with the exploration company?
Louisa: While I was there, the directors who represented the company in Australia and the director from a South Africa company that owns a lot of shares came and went up to Hidden Valley and wanted to see for themselves to see if it was feasible to open a mine there and what the extent of gold was there. It was pretty interesting, we got to meet two of them it was interesting to have these important people there. We were standing around these cores that gave really good results, there's a huge vein, and our exploration manager was with our onsite geologist trying their best to sell out the company to the director from South Africa because he's a bit stubborn. There was a tense discussion.

Denise: Did you hear what happened?
Louisa: It's going to go ahead. There was drilling taking place outside the open pit boundary they made and the director from South Africa wanted to know why this was happening. The geologist on site was explaining that there were gold mineral anomalies occurring outside the boundary to and they wanted to sterilize the area by drilling to see if it was worth extracting gold from outside the boundaries, if it would extend the mine life.

Denise: Do you have any customs you'd like to share?
Louisa: My mom's custom for the marriage ceremony is that the families get together for the marriage ceremony. Both the man and women's family brings food for the celebration. Each family tries to outdo the other with the amount they bring. Sometimes there are arranged marriages, but not as often. The dress is traditional.

Denise: What is the traditional dress?
Louisa: Grass skirts, necklaces, made with shells from the beach.

Denise: Is there any face painting?
Louisa: No, that's more of a Highland thing.

Denise: How far in advance do they plan a ceremony?
Louisa: It usually comes after harvest, so they can harvest the yams and other vegetables and store them for the occasion. They also have coconuts, bananas, taro, wild pig and fish.

Denise: Is this a tradition of the area, or the village or her tribe?
Louisa: Mostly from the area of Milne Bay.

Denise: On your partner's side of the family, from East New Britain, are there other traditions?
Louisa: Yeah, on his dad's side in the Duke of York islands, there's a tradition that when you go to their village, men sleep in one house, women sleep in another house, even after they are married, men and women have their own houses. Men sit in one group and women sit in another group.

Denise: So have you gone there often?
Louisa: We've been there twice. On his mom's side, you can't speak to your mother-in-law, but I can speak to brothers, and uncles, but not his parents. They do make acceptations though because I'm from a different province where you do have relations with your in-laws.

Denise: Do you know what you want to do when you graduate?
Louisa: I'm hoping to work with one of the oil companies called Oil Search, they basically look after most of the oil wells in the Highland region. They have their main office down in Sydney, so it would be easy to go between here and there.

Denise: So would you leave Port Moresby?
Louisa: Their other office is in Port Moresby, and I was interviewed the middle of last year and they mentioned that if I went to work for them, I could stay in Moresby and I could be flown to oil sites and just check on the program.

Denise: Thanks for your time and sharing your experiences!
Louisa: Thank you.