Of those workers, 45 left immediately, while 40 will leave in two weeks.

The remaining five, believed to be in senior roles, will work under Castlemaine Goldfields in "care and maintenance", with the company to use the mine as an exploration project.

Workers will receive their full redundancies and entitlements.

Castlemaine Goldfields will pay Lihir $4.5 million for the mine, with an extra 2.5 per cent in royalties for future production, capped at $50 million.

It was well below the $50 million to $100 million price range analysts initially predicted it could sell for.

Lihir shed 200 jobs from Ballarat in April last year, blamed on the underperformance of the mine's southern and central zones and "the natural cycle of mining".

In July, it cut another 200 jobs and put the mine on the market.

After interest from Australian and overseas companies, Lihir executive general manager of operations Peter Smith said Castlemaine put forward the best proposal forward.

"We took the view last year that we would write the asset off," Mr Smith said.

"That left us with no fixed view about what we were going to get, so we're happy to take the consideration we've now got from Castlemaine and we'll move forward on that basis."

It is expected the handover to Castlemaine Goldfields will occur in May, but will depend on Castlemaine shareholders approving the issue of new equity to raise at least $20 million.

While it was a sad day for Ballarat yesterday at the closure of the mine, which employed 500 at its peak, Mr Smith said Lihir had moved on.

"Our future is now on larger, low-cost operations, which don't include Ballarat," he said.

"We're pleased we've got a sale, pleased we've been able to pass it into someone's hands like Castlemaine, which should be a fairly seamless process . . . hopefully they make a success of it."

Lihir says there is the potential to redeploy about 12 workers to its mines in Australia, Papua New Guinea and West Africa.