Last Tuesday I woke to read this in the Otago Daily Times.
"The loudest voices against the Bendigo-Ophir Gold Project have a few things in common: they haven’t been on site, they haven’t read the 9400-page, $8 million evidential application and they’re more than happy to throw around words like ‘toxic sludge’ and ‘tailings dam’ as if repetition equals truth."
The article referred to two "highly vocal knights of the realm". I was one of them.
It was written by Damian Spring, CEO of Santana, the company seeking fast-track approval for the Bendigo mine.
There was a lot to take in from that first sentence. I’ll start with "throwing around words like "toxic sludge’ and "tailings dam".
I checked all three articles I had written. Not once had I used the phrase "toxic sludge".
"Toxic waste", "toxic tailings", yes — but "toxic sludge" never.
But even if I had, this is a description I found on Google: "Sludge is the residue left over from manufacturing, mining, or oil refining processes."
If it was the use of the word toxic that concerned him. I used that word based on the data I have seen from reports, using Santana’s own numbers, that estimate this dam could hold up to 130,000 tons of arsenic.
Arsenic is a toxin, and it’s not the only toxin that will be held in this "tailings dam". Another use of words Mr Spring took exception to.
He appears to favour the term "tailings storage facility".
But they are building a dam, it’s in their application, and it’s taller than the Clyde Dam.
Perhaps we should rename that dam the "Clyde Water Storage Facility".
To ordinary folk like me, a dam is a dam, whatever way you look at it. And they are putting tailings behind that dam. Tailings. Dam.
Mr Spring had opened this sentence with the observation that one of the things these two knights of the realm had in common was that neither had visited the site.
He then went on to point out that both of us had been invited. I cannot answer for Sir Sam, but this is the response I sent Mr Spring the day after I received his invitation, back in January.
"Thank you for the invitation which I am very happy to accept. I am heading overseas for the next fortnight, back the second week of February. For complete transparency I am working on another article following up on further feedback I have received on the Bendigo project, hopefully that will highlight some of the questions I have been asking. All I am looking for is a level of clarity and I appreciate that you are giving me the opportunity to have this discussion with your team.
"Thanks, Ian."
On the Monday that I arrived back from the overseas trip one of the first calls I made was to the Santana office to lock in that visit. By midday we had agreed I would meet Mr Spring at the site on Wednesday, two days later.
He knew all of this before his column appeared on Tuesday but chose not to share that information with the ODT or change his column to represent the facts which he then had.
Also, in that opening sentence (yes — he fitted a lot in) he claimed that I had not read the 9400-page, $8m evidential application. I imagine he made that claim with a high level of confidence because, while Santana had started preparing this application in 2023, it only landed in the public domain in November 2025, just before Christmas.
In another part of his article Mr Spring observed that: "In an era where AI can verify claims in seconds, the hard facts are hardly difficult to find."
I know a little about AI so I asked it "how long would it take someone like me to read the specific 9400-page report that Santana submitted for their application."
This was its answer.
"For an intelligent layperson:
"Basic familiarity: 4-6 months (intense effort)
"Solid comprehension: 1-2 years
"Confident technical evaluation: — would require expert collaboration."
Which brings me back to the only question I have ever asked: why is this being fast-tracked?
The gold is not going away. Let’s take the time to get it right.
Of course, none of the opponents to this claim have an $8m fund to hire the troves of experts they would need to validate any of the claims being made by Santana.
In fact, this coalition government recently shut down funding that had previously been in place for people who needed to hire experts to examine these reports. It was a maximum of $50,000 per claim — peanuts by comparison to what applicants have — but they abolished it anyway.
Thankfully, that has not stopped experts who are concerned, and who do have the expertise, volunteering their time to examine this application, in what free time they are able to find.
Which brings me to a second invitation that I received in the same week I got the one from Santana.
It was from a group called Sustainable Tarras and their offer was for me to hear from some of the experts they had been consulting with, including one of the world’s leading experts on tailings dams.
This expert doesn’t just "throw around" words like "toxic sludge" and "tailing dams". His words on this subject are treated globally with the highest respect. And his take on tailing dams and toxic waste are very different to that which Mr Spring outlined in his article.
Which possibly explains why he wasn’t one of the global experts that were commissioned by Santana for their report.
When I cancelled my visit to the mine after reading the article Mr Spring had written, the Sustainable Tarras team offered to take me up anyway, an offer I accepted as I had already committed to drive up to Tarras.
It was an enlightening visit which left me with even more questions. Questions which Mr Spring may well be able to answer, which is why I have now agreed to take the Santana tour of the site with Mr Spring.
One of those questions, I put to ChatGPT: "Have tailings dams ever failed?" This was the answer I got.
"Tailings dams have failed in multiple countries, including highly regulated ones. When they fail, the damage is permanent. Some of the worst industrial disasters in modern history have been tailings dam failures, even at facilities that had been declared safe."
One that it identified was Mt Polley in Canada.
"Material released: 25m cubic metres. Cause: foundation failure due to weak geology."
Of relevance to Bendigo. The dam itself did not collapse because of poor construction. It failed because of geological assumptions that proved incorrect.
I don’t have the space in this article to address the claims made in the technical side of the article, but I will address those after I visit the mine site because, despite the claims that Mr Spring made in his opinion piece, I have only ever asked one question.
"Does the risk/reward of this particular project justify fast tracking the decision to go ahead?"
Let’s take our time and get it right.
— Sir Ian Taylor is the founder and managing director of Animation Research.
