The 70:30 partners held a celebration on site yesterday and last night to commemorate the milestone, attended by AngloGold vice president Australia Mike Erickson and IGO managing director Peter Bradford, as well as Sy Van Dyk, CEO of Tropicana contractor Macmahon Holdings. 

Erickson said Tropicana, Australia's fourth-largest gold mine, held a special place in the heart of AngloGold, given it was the first mine the South African giant had ever built from scratch.

"The one thing that Tropicana will always be remembered for is incredible predictability of the ore, and the way the team's actually delivered - virtually quarter after quarter - it's exactly where we thought we'd be back in the study," Erickson said on site yesterday.

"It's a remarkable performance. The actual reconciliation of the ore and the nature of the orebody has been quite remarkable in it's cooperation, I guess, in terms of being able to estimate how much is there and predict what the future production is going to be. 

"It's a really tightly run, effective start-up."

Bradford said Tropicana was the product of strong collaboration between the partners and was hugely optimistic about the future.

"If you look at the potential we have at Tropicana I imagine that in two to three decades' time, we'll still have a mine here at Tropicana," he said.

Meanwhile, Tropicana general manager of operations Duncan Gibbs said to produce a million ounces, it required the mining of 61 million bank cubic metres, or 134 million tonnes, nearly 600,000 truck trips, 12.2 million tonnes of plant throughput and 4800 Olympic swimming pools worth of water.