Goldminers have long hogged the limelight at the Diggers and Dealers mining forum.
The annual conference in the remote mining town of Kalgoorlie, in the Western Australian Goldfields region, is the glittering highlight of the resources industry's events calendar.
Up-and-coming miners prize their shot to flaunt their wares to investors, while the majors covet the chance to snag an award at the glitzy gala dinner.
In recent years, goldminers have been supplanted at the top of the roster by the battery minerals crowd, buoyed by the burgeoning demand for ores like lithium and nickel essential to the manufacturing of electric vehicles.
But a record run has sent the price of bullion soaring and investors flocking back to the precious metal.
Amid an upswing in mergers and acquisitions activity among goldminers, the largest has been Northern Star's $5 billion takeover of De Grey Mining.
Northern Star's Super Pit dominates the Kalgoorlie landscape.
The ASX giant's largest asset is a popular tourist destination, with thousands of visitors drawn to the pit's public lookout each year to watch colossal mining trucks wind their way up the serpentine access track or see scheduled blasts shake the sheer rock walls below.
But the De Grey deal handed Northern Star a project that could dwarf the 130-year-old deposit, which has been plagued by productivity and cost headwinds in the past year.
The newly-acquired Hemi deposit, in the iron-ore dominated Pilbara region, contains an estimated 11 million ounces of gold.
That would fetch more than $55 billion at current prices.
The project, which is still seeking regulatory approval, has a slightly lower grade than the Super Pit at 1.3 grams per tonne.
But given the ravenous appetite for gold, even much lower grade deposits will attract interest at the Diggers conference.
Forum chair Jim Walker says the mood in the industry is upbeat.
"Gold's still going very, very well, lithium is coming back up again," he told AAP.
"So it's going to be a very positive conference from that point of view."
Lithium miners have been buoyed after a recovery in spodumene prices, after a global rout carved more than 90 per cent off the price of the mineral.
Prices have climbed 50 per cent since they bottomed out in June, with the stronger-than-expected uptake of electric vehicles now driving speculation lithium production will fall short of soaring demand.
But share prices for former market darlings IGO, Pilbara Minerals and Liontown Resources still languish well below the heights of two years ago.
While gold presenters now outweigh lithium at the conference, battery minerals producers will still make their presence felt.
Now in its 34th year, the forum is just as important to the Kalgoorlie economy as it is for micro-cap explorers looking to get their first project up.
More than 3000 people will flock to the town, swelling its population more than 10 per cent.
At Wednesday's gala night more than 1300 attendees will be catered for and a plane-load of staff flown in to serve them, given the limited staff and facilities in Kalgoorlie.
Marquees will be erected to house 154 exhibitors, while 65 presenters will hold court over three days.
It's no challenge for forum director Suzanne Christie, who has been organising the tricky logistics of the event from day one, Mr Walker said.
