NEW GUINEA

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4534, 9 February 1942, Page 3

NEW GUINEA

THE SEPIK DISTRICT BURIED TREASURE (By E.T.) Here, in the Sepik district, as the miners say, the gold has most of New Guinea mixed with it. It is a hard field, with no over-night millionaires, although the output of some claims has been handsome, and all at the present time are helping to finance Australia’s war effort. As a result of the large companies ousting the smaller man from Wau and Edie Creek, this district, with Wewak as port and administrative centre, came into being in the midthirties as the Mandated Territory’s newest gold field. In a matter of months the semi-circle of country between the Sepik River and the Dutch border—one of the last strongholds of head hunting—had been probed for its wealth. A hundred camps were scattered over it, and several thousands of indentured labourers were working sluice boxes. A 20-minute plane ride had taken the place of the seven days’ hike, and Wewak had grown from a headland with one district officer to a fully fledged township hospital, doctor, nurse, wireless station, freezer, officials’ bungalows, a store, a sixshop Chinatown, an aerodrome, two lorries—and a cemetery. PIONEERING-PLUS In the beginning it was pioneeringplus. Hundreds of square miles were there for the pegging, providing one had the necessary stamina, patience, labour line, money and stores to withstand the climate, disappbintments, bad food, isolation, everlasting walking and inevitable fever. But miners came, and most of them conquered enough of the untamed wilderness to make a living. Some had previously made fortunes at Edie Creek, and lost them. A few had followed the golden trail for half a lifetime, but the majority were anything but miners; R.N. reservists, ex-soldiers, dentists, solicitors, butchers, bakers —but all willing to “give it a go.” The gold is alluvial; neither reef nor lode has been discovered, and its appearance, or non-appearance, in any stream appears to be a matter of chance. No expensive equipment is necessary prospecting dishes, ‘picks, shovels, and sluice- boxes, that is all—and all work is done in the actual stream except for an occasional terrace where the old creek bed existed hundreds of years previously. But there are other expenses. Mining there by any standards is not the pastime of the traditional old fossicker and his dreams, but a stern business, with the race going to the man who depends upon more than mere luck.

SETTING OUT The prospector arrived by steamer, and was dumped on the beach with perhaps half a dozen boys and his gear. He would spend half a day packing his immediate requirements —light silk tent-fly, food, rice, trade goods—leave the rest at a native village and push off into the interior, his boys carrying 501 b. packs, and festooned with dangling lanterns, billies and odds and ends. Up over the peaks that formed the sea-fall, through thick rain forests, were villages, small and scattered. He prospected as he went, and usually found nothing; across the divide were the mountains, flattened to rounded foothills that gradually merged into the inland plain that stretched to the Sepik—still prospecting. Each cocoa-nut-crowned hilltop supports a large village, sometimes thousands strong, the inhabitants having had little or no contact with Europeans, the men and women naked, but generally friendly. Here his trade goods brought the prospector yams, bananas, paw-paws, taros and eocoanuts, enabling him to live on the country and save his stores. Where possible he put up at rest houses; otherwise he pitched his tent fly. He lived in the few damp, mouldy clothes he had with him, and slept in damp blankets. He was without company or news of the outside world, self-sufficient in all things, well or sick—and sickness comes pretty soon under these conditions. Occasionally to break the monotony there might be a quick trip to the coast when the six-weekly boat was due, or he might stumble across another' wanderer more permanently established. But, in spite of hardships, usually he stuck it, and finally, after weeks or months, found the embryo claim or lease for which lie sought. THE BATTLE BEGINS The story was then half over, but the battle had just begun. To have a permanent roof over his head would have become an obsession, so ground must be cleared and a house built—a real house of at least two rooms and a detached cook house and washroom. Then his labour line, which on his search seemed often too large to provision, would appear to have shrunk to a fraction of the size he now needed for the thousand tasks to be done. Without native labour all else is impossible—boys for the sluice boxes, for the house, the garden, and even more important, for the perpetual job of packing stores over the mountains from the sea coast into

the camp. Rice and still more rice, trade goods, bolts of lap-lap, tinned food, medical supplies; everything that humans, brown or white, needed came in 501 b. packs. But the gold getter is nothing if not personified tenacity. In the face of such things and between recurring bouts of malaria, he established himself. True, a few left their bones behind; a few others were murdered by the natives; but the dozen scattered camps grew with the months to 20, to 50, to 100, to 200. Gardens were planted and strange things imported—folding chairs, Japanese mats to make the camp home-like, stoves, poultry, meat safes, gramophones, wireless sets, .even goats and wiyes. CIVILISATION OVERNIGHT Real progress came when an aerodrome was cleared on the edge of tho foothills by the internationally famous Ray Parer. Cleared for private use, it attracted a commercial company, which in turn brought civilisation to the district overnight. And around that drome grew another outpost of Empire Maprik, with its assistant district officer, medical assistant, native hospital, a detachment of native police to frighten the headhunters, a parade ground and a flagpole, where in the warm sun and isolation of the Sepik foothills an outsized Australian flag flapped languidly in the breeze. And so another large tract of territory has been opened up by the pioneering prospector, paving the way for—what? Roadways, coffee plantations, rubber, pineapples, sugar, thousands of square miles of grazing land, timber? All are possible.