How Sudest Gold

Was Found

Pearler's Casual Remark About White Outcrops

By D. H. Osborne

IN the last quarter of the 19th century, the Louisiades knew the sporadic visits of the blackbirder (seeking cheap labour for the Queensland sugar plan tations) the pearl-shell fisherman and, lastly, the miner—one following in the wake of the other.

The miner remained —and, represented by succeeding generations, he was there when the Jap, fired by his dream of Pacific conquest, made his presence felt in the south-west corner of the hitherto peaceful ocean.

The pearlers were first there. Using a diving dress, they gathered MOP shell.

Cooktown, on the north Queensland coast, in the early days, was the pearlers’ headouarters. There they bought their stores and refitted their schooners for work in the Coral Sea, which had as its northern boundary the Louisiade Archi pelago. a 200 miles chain of islands and islets, eastward of Papua. There came the divers and men who made their liv ing from this sea of reefs and shell banks, to spend their money, to drink and to swop tales with the miners, who made up the bulk of the town’s popu lation.

It was David White, a diver who had worked off the Louisiades, whose idle conversation awakened the Queensland mining community to the possibilities of these islands as a new goldfield. White knew nothing of mining himself. He re marked that some of the islands were barren, and showed outcrops of white stone. This conveyed nothing to his mind. But, to the miners, the casually dropped information was like the scent of blood to a blood-hound. White out crops had only one significance to them —quartz—and perhaps gold.

Sixteen of them got “together and en gaged Harry Christensen (better known as “German Harry”), with his 50 tons sailing schooner “Griffen” on a three months’ charter, and left forthwith to prospect the islands of the Louisiades.

It was arranged that the schooner should remain at anchor while the party was ashore and their first landing was made at Janet Island, a few miles west of Sudest.

Here, they found plenty of quartz, just as Dave White had told them, but it was barren quartz; so they moved on to Sudest, where there was a safe, all weather anchorage for the schooner—the anchorage that subsequently became known as Griffen Point, after German Harry’s schooner.

The miners landed, and fortune smiled upon them almost at once. They started up one of the gullies, prospecting as they went, and each dish showing colours of gold. At a point four miles inland (named the “Four Mile”), in the gullies, and in a fair-sized stream, there could no longer be any doubt that gold was there in payable quantities. The ground, moreover, was shallow, and easy to work.

They felt, with justification, that they had come to the end of their search.

They returned to the anchorage—and made their first mistake. The “Griffen’s” master, apparently not bitten by the gold-bug himself, but seeing the possi bilities of a few side-lines to a gold mining enterprise, asked that he be allowed to break his contract with them and return to Cooktown. This they foolishly allowed him to do—strangely, inexplicably—because the miner’s most

dominant, ingrowing instinct is to keep all discoveries strictly to himself, and to cover up his trail accordingly.

WINDS favoured the “Griffon.” She reached Cooktown in record time, and the news she brought spread like a bush-fire through the town.

The men back on Sudest had not got very far with their work when a sail ap peared over the western horizon, and there was the “Griffen” again, with the vanguard of the rush that had developed just half a step behind the spread of the news. Men began to arrive on the island as quickly as they could charter ships to take them across the Coral Sea.

Sudest runs almost east and west, and is about 50 miles long by 15 miles across at its widest part. The auriferous belt runs right across the island, starting at the north-west end and extending to the south side, at a point about 20 miles from the most easterly point, providing an extensive field that in time accom modated about 600 miners.

AT the time gold was discovered there, the island was literally a law unto itself —and even on the mainland of what, at that time, was called British New Guinea, there were no mining regu lations. Queensland and two other Aus tralian States were paying a subsidy for the upkeep of the Territory; but in the Territory itself there was no form of taxation or tariff.

It was some considerable time after Sudest was put on the map, minerally, that Sir William McGregor, in the British gunboat, “Challenger,” paid the island a visit. He summoned all the miners to a meeting at the landing, where they were asked to decide under which of the three Australian subsidising State’s mining laws they were prepared to work. Queensland regulations were decided upon—possibly because the majority were Queensland men —and Sir William, without further parley, declared them legally adopted.

The natives of the island gave little trouble. Considered to be rather a poor lot, as natives went thereabouts, they had for generations been the natural prey of the Moturina and Brooker islanders, who continually raided Sudest, killing the men, capturing the women and looting gardens and houses. The Sudestians were there fore pleased enough to gain the protec tion of the all-powerful white man— although for long after the miners had settled there, it was customary for them to down tools and go bush, as soon as a sail appeared to the westward.

The on Misima was the next find, and miners presently moved over there, from Sudest.