deposits of Vanua Lava
p. 87 · Read in the full issue
Four years among the sulphur deposits of Vanua Lava
By Doug Askew
I was intensely interested in the article by PI M's staff writer on the Vanua Lava sulphur deposits (PIM, Oct., p. 72). He must have carried out quite a bit of research, and he wins my compliments for having done a very good job. But he hasn’t got the full story.
THAT blurb by T. J. McMahon in the Sydney Mail of 1921 was just a lot of fanciful nonsense writ ten under the stimulation of Square Face gin. That gin was only 3/- per large bottle in those days—as it was even in my time on Vanua Lava, which was from 1930 to 1934.
If I remember correctly, McMahon was engaged by old “Captain” Whit ford, of Kwakea, Vanua Lava, to survey the island’s deposits, and the old man and his family always believed that there was a fortune in “them thar hills,” thanks to McMahon.
Survey
All the same, do not decry those deposits. There is a lot of 99.7 per cent, sulphur over a large area on the surface, which looks most spectacular, plus hundreds of active fumaroles and lakes of boiling mud and sulphur.
I got involved in investigating these deposits when Mr. B. Dunstan, chief geologist for the Queensland Govern ment, and Mr. F. C. Richards, a metallurgist from Mount Morgan, hired me in Noumea in 1930 to go to Vanua Lava to do the “spade work’* for a survey that they proposed to make.
I had been working up till then for a timber company which had just folded up; and I went off to Vanua Lava to engage labour, cut a road up to the sulphur around Mt. Suretamati, and establish a base camp. My salary was £6 a week!
Some two months later Messrs.
Dunstan and Richards arrived at the Whitfords’ place in the La Perouse, and the big job then was to get them to the top of Suretamati.
As both of them were well up in years, they were dead game. But they had no idea of what they were up against, for the deposits were about 3,000 ft up from the beach at
Hundreds of active fumaroles (holes emitting fumes and vapour) are a feature of the Vanua Lava landscape. This is one of them.