Our Awaited 150m outstanding Drill results
(which would be in hand by now as two weeks have passed)
maybe the "
source" of these earlier prospectors riches!
See copy of wikipedia snippet
Gold rush
The first strike at Wau, the start of what would be known as the
Morobe Goldfield, was made at Koranga Creek by William ‘Shark-Eye’ Park, probably towards the end of 1921. Park and his partner, Jack Nettleton, ran a clandestine mining operation for twelve months from April 1922 until a new Mining Ordinance enabled them to get their gold out legally. Nettleton, it is known, took out 6000
troy ounces, or about 190 kg, of gold in August 1923.
Only a handful of miners worked the field, rich as it was, until 1924. From 1924 to 1926 perhaps 20 miners were on the field producing about 200 kg of gold a year.
The real rush began in 1926 with much bigger discoveries at Edie Creek, above Wau. The new rush made air transport viable and
Wau's airstrip opened in 1927 by the Parer brothers originally of Spanish descent. In 1928 there were 200 miners and production was about
three tonnes a year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wau,_Papua_New_Guinea
Some Other Research
very early history on edie creek: copied and pasted below
In January 1926 Bill Royal and one labourer spent five days cutting a track through heavy timber and scaling cliff faces to get to Upper, or Top, Edie Creek. Rising high on Mount Kaindi, Upper Edie plunged over a massive rock bar to cascade into Lower Edie. In only 4 miles from Upper Edie to the Bulolo the creek fell 4000 feet. Upper Edie was over 7000 feet above sea level. Moss covered tree trunks, roots and rotting logs; each night it rained; and often during the day the clouds piled up against the mountains, covering the mining area in more rain or dense fog. Royal and his partner, Chisholm, were in debt and almost out of stores; but in Upper Edie Royal found that he could wash up to
7 pennyweights in a dish. He left to report his strike and register claims:
he had found Papua New Guinea’s richest alluvial field. Upper Edie, slowed by the rock bar, had been dropping gold in ‘free-wash’ which was up to 8 feet deep along several miles of the main creek and its short tributaries.
Where successful miners on Papuan fields took 300 ounces in a year, enough to pay their expenses and give them a spell in Samarai and Australia, on Edie they washed-up thousands of ounces and hoped to join the carefree rich, a goal as elusive as the big strike. On Papuan fields nuggets were rare; on Edie the labourers picking out stones from the head of the sluice often cried, ‘Golston i stap’. They recognised the nuggets (or ‘specimens’) by their weight rather than by their colour.
Boats began calling at Salamaua, the
saksak (sago leaf) town on the narrow spit jutting into Huon Gulf. It grew quickly as a port and the beginning of the track into Edie. By September 1926 there were ninety miners and 540 labourers on the goldfield, by October there were 158 miners and 790 labourers and by November there were 219 miners and 1324 labourers. Joe Sloane and Dick Glasson took 240 ounces in one day from a 15-inch box on Midas Creek. During 1927 the miners declared over 110,000 ounces at Edie and Salamaua.
Among the first to arrive at Edie were some of the men who had battled around the Papuan fields for more than twenty years: Frank Pryke, Les Joubert, Charles Ericksen, Dave Davies, Andy Gillespie, and Ned Ryan. Gordon Robertson, Peter ‘Bourke’ (Bjorquist), George Arnold and Joe Sloane were already on Bulolo when Royal climbed to Upper Edie. Lucky Joe Sloane became one of the ‘Big Six’, the group who first pegged much of Upper Edie. John Henry Sloane, a Queenslander, went to south-eastern New Guinea with James Hurley’s prospecting expedition of 1894. When news of Lobb and Ede’s strike on Woodlark reached north Queensland he went back to mine on the islands and then shifted to the Gira. After going to South Africa too late to fight the Boers he returned to follow the diggers to the Yodda, the Waria, the Lakekamu and then back to the Gira to mine osmiridium when it suddenly and briefly increased in value at the end of World War 1. Before he went to look at Sharkeye Park’s prospect he was already known as Lucky Joe. He had been wounded on the Yodda, shot men on the Aikora, and took a woman from the Waria.
Table 17
Sepik Goldfield
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From 1936/37 to 1939/40 over 6000 ounces were taken each year from the Sepik, the second most productive field in the Mandated Territory. In the year of greatest production, 1937/38, the alluvial miners obtained 11,012 ounces. In the next year there were thirty white miners and over 500 labourers working gold on the Sepik.
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Young men fresh from Australia and proud of their physical strength rested exhausted on Komiatum Hill, the first tough climb out of Salamaua, and wondered how the old diggers, many still suffering from over-indulgence at the store, completed the six-day walk into Edie. It was, Frank Pryke said, the worst track he had seen used to supply a goldfield; and at the end of it Edie was ‘cold and wet — a miserable kind of place’
FID
P.S. to Tracey Lake
Stop stalling!
Times Up!
Drill Results Now Immediately!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
