Day Dawn Is Idle

Finance Problem Insoluble

THE directors of Day Dawn (New Guinea), Ltd., announced on August 10 that the response of shareholders to the invitation to take up their respective quotas in the debenture issue was ex tremely disappointing. An inadequate amount was applied for, and the cheques have been returned to the applicants.

New Guinea Goldfields was granted an option to purchase, but, after inspection, has notified the company that it declined to exercise the option.

All work at the mine at Edie Creek has now ceased pending consideration of pro posals to sell or reorganise the company.

It will be remembered that this mine, so flourishing and profitable a year or two ago, suddenly announced early in 1935 that funds were not enough to allow mining operations to continue. The white staff was put off, but it was expected that cyaniding would be commenced very soon, as a great quantity of material awaits treatment, and a treatment plant was in stalled recently at a cost of £15,000. The shareholders, angered at this sudden unexpected development, turned the old directors out of office. A new board has been trying to solve the prob lem of finance ever since; but, ap parently, without success. Day Dawn, for some years, was a great money spinner, but the ore evidently petered out.

Profitable cyaniding operations could have been gone on for a year or two, however, and the board seems to have been at fault in not having made pro vision, from profits, for the finance neces sary to carry on, on a reduced scale.

It looks now as if the Day Dawn mine

will be picked up, very cheaply, by some concern which can make, out of the treatment side, the profits that should rightly have gone to the D.D. share holders.

Mr. I. H. Grabowsky, general manager of Guinea Airways Ltd., returned to New Guinea in the middle of July after a brief visit to Sydney and Melbourne,