ARAWATA BILL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 733, 31 July 1953, Page 5

ARAWATA BILL

Sir.-While reading your leading article on Arawata Bill, I was reminded of an old prospector, Tom Kirby, whom I met in Patearoa, Central Otago, some 25 years ago. He was a well-educated man, had read and could quote the classics, and‘ had memorised a prodigious store of factual knowledge. He could give at once such information as the comparative sizes of countries, and their populations. He knew all the. members of the Royal Family for generations back, and could give the dates of their births, marriages, and deaths. He could keep books, do simple accounting at least, but never’ worked ‘at a "job longer than to gather sufficient funds to equip

himself for a prospecting expedition ‘to the back country beyond the Serpentine, He went on foot and, though the wrong side of 50, carried 60 Ib. loads imperturbably, generally in. a wheat sack. Like many of his type he was kindhearted and generous. I was doing a little fossicking myself at the time in one of the old sluicing claims at the back of Patearoa ‘township, where my uncle had been tunnelling into a steep face, and then washing for prospects and "cradling" into the deep waters of an adjoining pond. Learning that I was trying to get some specimens of alluvial gold and the tiny little rubies, etc., often found with them, to show my school pupils, old Tom Kirby at orice produced some of his hard-won "prospects" and insisted that I take came.

D. J. C.

PRINGLE

(Christchurch),