The Groote Eylandt Mining Company, known by its acronym GEMCO, is an Australian company that was commissioned to mine high grade

manganese ore Manganese is a chemical element; it has symbol Mn and atomic number 25. It is a hard, brittle, silvery metal, often found in minerals in combination with iron. Manganese was first isolated in the 1770s. It is a transition metal with a multifac ...

. GEMCO is majority owned by

South32 South32 Limited is a mining and metals company headquartered in Perth, Western Australia. It was spun out of BHP Billiton on 18 May 2015. It is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange with secondary listings on the Johannesburg and Londo ...

. It runs its operation on 84 square kilometres (32 sq. mi.) of the

Arnhem Land Arnhem Land is a historical region of the Northern Territory of Australia. It is located in the north-eastern corner of the territory and is around from the territorial capital, Darwin, Northern Territory, Darwin. In 1623, Dutch East India Compa ...

Aboriginal Reserve, which is part of

Groote Eylandt Groote Eylandt ( Anindilyakwa: ''Ayangkidarrba''; meaning "island" ) is the largest island in the Gulf of Carpentaria and the fourth largest island in Australia. It was named by the explorer Abel Tasman in 1644 and is Dutch for "large island" ...

, a 2,326 square kilometre (898 sq. mi.) island in the

Gulf of Carpentaria The Gulf of Carpentaria is a sea off the northern coast of Australia. It is enclosed on three sides by northern Australia and bounded on the north by the eastern Arafura Sea, which separates Australia and New Guinea. The northern boundary ...

that has a population of 1539. The company is one of three manganese ore mining companies in Australia. GEMCO uses a mining extraction method called open cut strip mining. It sends its ore to be smelted at the Tasmanian Electro Metallurgical Company (TEMCO). TEMCO, established in 1965, is Australia's only ferroalloy smelter site, situated at

Bell Bay, Tasmania Bell Bay is an industrial centre and port located on the eastern shore of the Tamar River (Tasmania), Tamar River, in northern Tasmania, Australia. It lies just south of George Town, Tasmania, George Town. In the year ended June 2021, 3.6 millio ...

, north of Launceston at the other end of the continent. The company extracts roughly 5 million tonnes of manganese ore every year. In 1964, GEMCO leased land for mine from Church Missionary Society at Angurugu, Northern Territory on Groote Eylandt with royalties paid into Groote Eylandt Aboriginal Trust Fund for aborigines from 28 August 1969.

References

{{reflist Mining companies of Australia Companies based in the Northern Territory Groote Eylandt Mining in the Northern Territory