Fiji Gold

Description of Tavua Field

THIS is a fascinating spot (says Frank.

A Murphy, in the Melbourne Herald, describing the new Tavua goldfield, in Fiji). It is unlike any goldfield that I have ever seen.

You get into it from the native village of Tavua—you pronounce it Tah-vooa— by a six mile road upon which the Theodore group spent several thousand pounds. Long before you reach the spot you can see the wood and iron huts, white against the black forbidding background of the Kormboya ranges.

These are hills with a vengeance— jagged and slashed with gullies with none of that vivid greenness that softens the tropical landscape in other parts of the island.

The mines are on a minor range at the foot of this barrier. You drive right up to the Emperor. The shaft is on a ridge and the mill, where the ore is crushed, is on a wide ledge below it.

Actually the Emperor is the only show on the field which fits in with the average idea of what a mine should look like. You look away from the mill to the right and there, if you have some body to point it out to you, you behold Loloma.

The claim lies in a basin, and there is nothing spectacular about it. High up above you, dominating the entire field, is Koroere, a great big black pinnacle, with holes blown into its sides. They have been tunnelling there to find the lode which comes in from the Emperor lease next door.

Costellos’ “Jewellery Shop”

On top of Koroere someone has stuck a pole. It was useful to hang to on windy days when you look south into the famous “Jewellery Shop,” the 30 acres which the Costellos reserved for them selves when they sold the Emperor, and Koroere, to the Theodore group.

This is the spot upon which old Bill Borthwick first found the ore which has: led to the opening up of the field.

I heard lots of yarns of how Bill Borthwick came to find Tavua. I think the most credible is the one which he told me himself, as he sat hunched up, in his queer way, at Dan Costello’s hotel in Suva. Bill Borthwick is an old man, over seventy, wealthy now, but just plain old Bill, full of Scottish caution and content to go on looking for gold. He has been doing that for 50 years all over the place.

He is the one prospector in ten thousand who would have recognised the gold possibilities of Tavua, even if he had not been given a hint of them before he went there.

Similar Field.

Some of his fifty years of prospecting were spent in New Zealand on a goldfield, where the ore is almost similar to that in Fiji. There are very few other places in the world where the same type of stuff occurs.

Bill told me how, a few years ago, when things were bad, Pat Costello said to him one day, “How about having a look for that gold out Tavua way?” Pat had heard, many years before, that a man had found colours in a creek not far from the village of Tavua. Borthwick packed his swag, and, with his dish strapped to his back, went to see what he could find.

He washed colours in the creek and kept going up the stream until he came to a spot that he sensed was the source of the gold. He scratched about and got some gold-bearing stone. That convinced him, so he pegged the place out for the Costello brothers.

Not very long after that a small paragraph appeared in one of the Sydney papers saying that Pat Costello had a gold claim at Tavua. E. G. Theodore saw that paragraph. He remembered Pat Costello. They had met once in Suva, while Theodore was on his way to America. The latter wrote to Costello, asking for further information —and that’s how the former Federal Treasurer first came into the business.

Of course, I cannot say what the field is really like, as an investing proposition. All I can tell you is that there is only one show there that can be regarded in any sense as a proven mine, and that is the Emperor.

“Let Ted Do It”

The others are still in the prospecting stage. Some of them very much so.

The country is pegged out for miles, and scores of areas have had practically nothing done to them, bar the sticking in of the pegs.

On June 1 most of the prospecting leases will come up for review by the Government. There is no certainty that the people who are holding them to-day will be given a renewal of their rights.

The Government, which is keeping a very cool, clear head in the matter, will ask pertinent questions regarding the intentions of the holders, will want to know what work has been done and what is going to be done, and where the money is coming from to do it.

It is this necessity to have something to show on June 1 that is causing a big influx of mining experts, miners and others to the fields at the moment.

Although nearly everybody up there will deny it, you can take it from me that up to the present most of the people with areas around Tavua have been letting the Theodore group do all the developing.

The motto of Tavua ought to be, “Let Ted do it.”