Telfer is a minesite and company town in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, within the Great Sandy Desert.

The town grew to a peak of almost 1,000 inhabitants in the early 1990s, with services such as a supermarket, a police station, a bank, a community hall, a library and a number of sporting facilities being available.

[8] Telfer's demographic characteristics were typical of a northern Western Australian mining town in the time period.

One of the main reasons for the town's closure was that fly-in fly-out rosters gave the mine access to a larger skilled work force and to people that would otherwise have been unwilling to relocate to a remote location like Telfer.

High production costs were primarily caused by the presence of cyanide soluble copper in the open pit ore.[8] In 2002, Newcrest Mining announced a new redevelopment project worth $1 billion,[9] after discovering new mineral areas and a reserve base of some 591 tonnes (19 million troy ounces) of gold and 640 thousand tonnes (1.4 billion pounds) of copper.