W. G. Lawler's

Luck

How Chance Turned English man’s £20 Tavua Land Investment Into Fortune of £70,000

From Our Own Correspondent.

Suva, May 14.

There arrived in Sydney on May 20 by the Monterey from Suva, a young Englishman, Mr. W. G. Lawler, whose colossal luck puts the lurid stories of fiction writers to shame. Five years ago, he was battling through life in a cold, unsympathetic world. To-day, because he happened to risk £20 on a block of land at Tavua, Fiji, he is worth something like £70,000! Here is his own story, told to our Fiji correspondent before Mr. Lawler stepped on board the liner on his way to Melbourne to collect part of his huge fortune.

MR. W. G. LAWLER is a young man of 37, who hails from England, and whose life has already been filled with a degree of romantic adventure not given to many of us. Son of an official in a London gas company, he studied geology as a hobby. During the war he served with the Seventh Middlesex Regiment, and was so badly poisoned in France that for six months he lay in hospital struggling for life. When he was discharged as unfit, his adventurous spirit led him to join the crew of a sea-going tug engaged in towing barges of munitions from England to Russia.

It was natural, therefore, that he should be attracted by the glamour of the tropics and so he made his way to Fiji in 1923.

“I found it pretty hard to make a living on arriving in Fiji in 1923,” he said, “but I turned my hand at anything that came along. I was the overseer of sugar and coconut plantations, drove the first bus in Fiji, ran a commission agency, etc.

Eventually, I scraped together enough to buy, on extended terms, a small tumbledown hotel at Navua, 20 odd miles by launch from Suva.

“There a company, of which Sir Maynard Hedstrom, of Suva, is a director, is struggling to make a success of dairying in the tropics, and there is only a handful of Europeans in the district, so that the hotel brought very few chips into the pot.

Things were looking rather dismal, and it was very difficult to find the instalments on the hotel and to keep my wife and family in comfort.

“With my previous smattering of geology, I had always kept an eye open for gold, and had fossicked about in search of it in Fiji.

“Towards the end of 1933, I heard that Pat Costello had found gold at Tavua, and a Melbourne group asked me to take out areas for them. Another hotelkeeper of Suva had pegged an area of 400 acres right next to Pat Costello’s block, but did not think anything of it, so sold it to me for £20. I picked out quite a lot of ground for the Melbourne group, which then sent an expert to Fiji to visit the field. Of course, no development work had been done, and there was really nothing that the expert could see, so it is no wonder that his report was unfavourable.

“Then came my slice of luck—the Melbourne group told me that I could keep any of the areas for myself. Well. I had blind confidence in the claim I had bought

for £20, and so, with great difficulty, I scraped together the few pounds necessary to pay some Fijians to put up a bure (native hut of grass and thatch) and to engage a few native boys at 2/- per day to dig for me.

“After a while every dish I washed showed gold, but everybody scoffed at the existence of payable gold in Fiji. Mr.

E. G. Theodore was engaged in testing out his claim alongside mine, and I believed that if he proved his claim, he proved mine at the same time. So I just carried on as best I could.

“About this time I became very hard up and I remember that I offered a third share in my claim on Loloma (Fijian for “gift”) to a prominent silver merchant for £1000. He looked at me pityingly, and said that if ever gold was really found on it in paying quantities he would willingly ‘eat his hat.’

“Mr. Theodore reciprocated my interest in his claim and eventually offered me £1000 for the option to purchase it, the purchase price to be £10,000. However, I stuck out for £10,000 and 10 per cent, in shares in any company formed by Mr.

Theodore to develop the claim.

“Finally, I got my way and Tom Victor came down to inspect the area. He reported that the Loloma was the richest surface proposition he had ever sampled.

So the Loloma Gold Mining Co. was floated in Melbourne with a capital of £150,000 divided into 300,000 shares of 10/- each, of which I got 30,000 fully paid shares.

The shares offered to the public are paid only to 3/-, but apparently the public want them very much as they were quoted on Melbourne Stock Exchange recently at £2. Upon this basis my shares are worth £60,000, which, plus £10,000 in cash, makes £70,000 coming to me from the Loloma claim. Not a bad return on my original investment of £20, although most of it is still on paper.

“Am I going to retire? Not on your life! I am only 37, and I am going to stay in Fiji and watch mining developments, which will be mighty interesting to me, especially at Loloma.”