GOLD IN NEW GUINEA

Grey River Argus, 9 November 1931, Page 2

GOLD IN NEW GUINEA

| Good Prospects of Dredges I I i MACHINERY TRANSPORTED BY AEROPLANES. > j That there is a great gold industry commencing in New Guinea is the conviction of a great many people, and 'especially such as have any actual acquaintance with the country. Among these is Mr Fred W. R. Godden, formerly well known on the West Coast and particularly in the Inangahua district, in connection with gold mining propositions. Writing from New Guinea recently to a Greymouth friend, Mr Godden says;— The property has been closely bored and has given results showing 40,000,000 cubic yards worth 2/1 per yard. The values are very conservative as 11 have cheeked them all, and there is (more yardage yet to be tested, proba- ' bly ano her 10,000.000. The ground is only 21 feet deep. Two 10 cubic feet dredges are to be put on and will treat between them 3.200,000 yards a year at an all-in cost of 74d. The Placer | Coy. is not a working company, only | a holding one, and they have, floated' Bulolo Gold Dredging to work it. It ■ It was a huge flotation. The issued ; capital is 790,000 £1 shares and the actual cash to be raised was £476,000, ’and it was over-subscribed. The difjference between £476,000 and £790,000 is made up of Placer’s 244,000 fully 'paid shares, and 70,000 shares for the j people Placer bought from. Placer also gets £70,000 in cash. The cost of equipping the property will be high as * there are no roads. We contemplated 1 uilding a road to cost £200,000, but ( 'now have bought three huge Junker three-engined planes, and will fly everything in. The planes will carry j 10,000 lbs. and take girders up to 24 feet long in the cargo hatch. There are one or two parts of the dredges 'that are over 10,000 lbs. but they will be sectionised down to 10,000. I worked out all the construction timetable |and the profit returns. We anticipate (starting the first dredge in February, 1 1932, and the second six months later. We reckon on paying 10 per cent the first year, but everything is so con--1 servatively estimated that these figures will be exceeded. Geo. Clark, late of Rimu, is to be General Manager of Bulolo Gold Dredging. I am engaged in testing another big property about 10 miles further down the river and although we are not looking for another 2/1 show, the work to date is very encouraging. I expect the work will take me until about next February. To show you what the big ' people think of Placer, one big concern in America which put £25,000 in Bui 1010, bought 10,000 of 'the unissued Placer shares at 41/8 (10 dollars), and took a three years’ option over the remaining 20,000 at 62/6 (15 dollars), I think -in three years Placers will be near £5. The country is not nearly as bad as it is painted, and I was very surprised at it. It is densely timber- , ed like New Zealand, and full of riv- ' ers. The climate is quite good, but there are no seasons; it is the same all the year round. It agrees with me and I am feeling very fit and have lost over 11 stone in weight. In a later letter Mr Godden statj ed: — Things are going along very I nicely with me on the property I am testing and results are good and the ■ show is going to be a winner alright, j On the other property belonging to I Placer, Bulolo Gold Dredging, the construction of the two dredges is getting ' well under weigh. The two giant j planes are here and will be starting to I fly the heavy stuff in any day. Up to • date it has only been light stuff comI ing in and the ordinary single engined Junkers, which can carry a ton of cargo, have been bringing in all that > has been required. In my previous

letter I told you I thought Geo. Carr would be coming up as manager of Bulolo, but he did not take the job. and a Mr Harris is the manager. Pleased to know things have been prospering with you in the Foundry and I hope it will long continue. lam glad a crowd is having a go at the ground at Blackwater but it is not the place I tested. I tried the river flats for dredging, but the place they are going to work is the high ground fronting the flats. They are going to sluice it. and I hope they are successful. I spent a lot of time on the investigation of this ground when I was living in Reefton and I know so far as values are concerned it is alright, but the water is going to be the trouble. It will be an expensive job to bring it in. We had a very rough spin about two months ago with flood, having six, one after the other. The river, the Watut, would rise about nine feet Jin about two hours and run like a mill race for about four hours, and then in another six hours would be down nearly to normal again Then there would be another terrific storm in the mountains, about 15 miles away, we could see the rain pouring down, and down would come, the river again. It cul minated by the father of all the floods coming along and washing away our house and all the attendant buildings. Fortunately we knew it was coming <ind were able to shitt everything that | mattered before it arrived, but we hao to build another camp, and then as if it was satisfied, the river went back* to its normal state and has been like a sleeping child since. We were not taking any chances, however, and built our camp 250 yards away from the v ater. Another of those familiar with New Guinea gold developments is Air L. Waterhouse, who stated recently at Auckland that each portion of a 3000 ton dredge had to be carried by aero-' plane over wild mountain ridges 10,000 feet high, inhabited by natives who knew nothing of civilisation, who head hunt and worship strange gods, with outlandish ritual, is to think at once of the ageless lure of gold and the intrepidity of those who blaze trails whether of colonisation or industry. Mr Waterhouse is a director of the Placer Development Company and the Bulolo Gold Dredging Company at New Guinea. He went last trip by the Sonoma to America. There is gold in New Guinea, but the difficulty in a laqd which is without roads and mountainous in the extreme is, obviously, transport. So the company has used great three-engined aeroplanes, which fly from the seaport of Lea, fifty miles inland beyond the ranges, to where the company has built its own aerodrome and workshops. Each of the ’planes can carry 69501bs and in 310 trips they have taken 800 tons of dredging material. It is calculated that 3000 tons will have to be 11 flown in” altogether. Two dredges are being assembled on the Bulolo River, where the company has its headquarters. Each will be 140 feet long and 60 feet in beam. They were built in Sydney, shipped to Lea, and there loaded, each part separately, on to the ’planes. The machines can carry steel plates up to 21ft in length. But the steel plates form only one of a vast miscellany of articles, for the company will build its own refrigerators, its owu electrical plants, which will involve harnessing the water. Tn the beginning it took the prospectors of the Bulolo site a week to pass the 50 miles from the coast through the jungle, and now the distance is flown in 40 minutes.

•‘The Bulolo Valley is 4J miles long,” - / said Mr “and 2000 feejt i R average width. It is of an average depth of 22 feet. It is estimated that there are 40,000,000 yards workable, and at a gross return of 2/1 a yard.” Even now, when an aeroplane passes over the city, faces will turn’ skyward, so what must have been the amazed

fear of the natives whin first a ’plane swooped from the blue into the stillness of their domain, and the engine’s roar echoed into the hills? “The natives call them ‘bains’, which is the native for pigeon. They chatted about ‘big feller balus belong white feller.’ The firm employs 500 natives and 100 whites. The natives are recruited from different villages and are provided with sleeping accommodation, food and tobacco. After six months they put on half as much weight again.” added Mr Waterhouse, “owing to the regular good food. But the difficulty is language. There must be at least 300 dialects in New Guinea, each unintelligible to the other, and so queer situations arise of a dark folk, to whom all the ways of civilisation are strange, and on whom its effect is transitory once they return to the jungle, for they are able ,to speak with one another only in English. They receive 10/- a month and are paid at the end of two years in marks, a survival of the German regime in New Guinea. ’ ’ NATIVES STILL HEAD HUNTERS. But away back in the hills, where the white man does not go, the natives are unchanged. There in the twilight of the jungle, in their little village.", they still worship the old gods, and propitiate them with blood. Inter village warfare is still active, with toll* demanded in heads. Sometimes, if an airman flies over the further ranges, where things remained undisturbed, and flies too low, he is greeted with arrows and spears. In a community of 100 white men there is bound to be some organisation lor sport, and there is a club on the Bulolo River. They play cricket and football, and a tennis court is in the making The natives look on and doubt the sanity of the ‘ ‘ white feller. ” ‘ ‘ But it Imust seem incomprehensible to them,” said Mr Waterhouse, ‘‘ to see monsters, weighing nine tons over all, rush to the ground at a speed of 85 miles an hour, when just yonder the jungle crowds down thick and close.”