Mrs. Doris Booth,

O.B.E.

r[E owner-manager of the largest in dividual mine on the Morobe gold field, New Guinea, Mrs. Doris Booth, is at present spending a well earned holiday in Tasmania and Victoria.

Charming and well dressed, with her black hair smoothly braided round her head, she is one of the best-known women in the Mandated Territory.

It is just 17 years since Mrs. Booth first went to New Guinea to live on a coconut estate. After three years of plantation life she decided to try her luck on the newly-discovered goldfield at Mo robe, which in those days before aero plane travel was six days’ journey on foot through dense bush from the coast.

Mrs. Booth was the first white woman to make the journey.

Working for the first year with the man who discovered the field, she learnt enough about alluvial mining to begin by herself. Then, in 1925, she pegged out a claim 98 chains in length along the river and 11 chains wide, and began to work her own mine. It was slow work at the beginning. The gold had to be washed in boxes which had been hollow ed out of logs with an adze. It was not until 1930, when machinery was brought up by aeroplane from the coast, that this primitive method was abandoned.

To-day, Mrs. Booth’s mine is a large, busy-looking place, criss-crossed with ma chinery and long sluices. She has five Europeans and 200 natives working for her.

Not the least interesting part of the romantic story of her experiences in those early pioneering days is the splen did work she did in 1926 in organising hospitals and medical care on the goldfield during an exceptionally bad outbreak of dysentery among the natives. Recogni tion came to her for this in the form of an 0.8. E. A trained nurse, she has al ways had a small hospital for the natives working in her own mine, and she at tends to all their medical needs.