Cable Station Up For

Sale At £75,000

rE Fanning Island cable station, which became re dundant when the final links of the new COMPAC cable were opened in December between Sydney and Vancouver, is up for sale for £A75,000 or the best offer.

The station is owned by Cable and Wireless Ltd,, of London. It consists of instrument buildings and em ployees’ houses on a 40-acre site. (Two of the build ings are seen in the accompanying photograph.) As the cable station is on Crown land, anyone who buys it will have to negotiate a lease with the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony authorities, who administer Fanning Island.

The main drawback to buying the station is that it is a long way away from anywhere. Honolulu, the nearest big centre, is more than 1,000 miles distant to the north.

However, the isolation of Fanning Island and the fact that it has a big, shallow, fish-filled lagoon, could make the cable station attractive to businessmen who see

money in it as a potential away-from-it-all hotel. / similar defunct cable station—on Norfolk Island, whicl is 930 miles from Sydney—has already been turned int< a hotel.

The last staff members of the station—lo European and about 50 Gilbertese—left the island in January fo Christmas Island, from where they were to be repatri ated. The last manager w'as an Australian, Mr. R. H Payne. Originally, the staff comprised 31 European and 200 Gilbertese.

Fanning Island’s only inhabitants now are the em ployees of Fanning Island Plantations Ltd. (a sub sidiary of Burns, Philp) which has about 3,100 acre of land under coconuts. This property is not for sale