The Empire Dredging Company has clearly demonstrated that dredging pays handsomely on the Pomahaka when gone about in an up-to-date manner, for 1200 per annum in wages alone is paid by this one dredge (writes the Mataura Ensign's Kelso correspondent).
With regard to the dredge and the fish in the river, about which some discussion took place at the recent meeting of the Otago Acclimatisation Society, some 50 gentlemen residing between Kelso and the dredge and whose stock drink the waters of the Pomahaka River have signed the following declaration and have handed it to the manager of the dredge: "We, the undersigned, hereby declare that in our opinion the working of the Empire dredge has done no harm whatever to the waters of the Pomahaka River, and we further declare that we suffer no loss or inconvenience by any difference in the water of the river the working of your dredge occasions. Nor have we noticed any disinclination on the part of our stock (horses, cattle, etc) to drink the water of the river, nor any illness or death after having drunk the water of the river."
• A man who has done his duty to the State, in at least one respect, was charged at Balclutha yesterday with having neglected to send his youngest child to school.
Asked the child's age, he said "it" might be six, or nearly seven, and he would not swear it was not over eight, but he believed it was under that age.
"But," asked the magistrate, "don't you know the ages of your own children?"
"Well," replied the defendant after a pause, "you see, I've had 19 of them."
The magistrate said there was some excuse.
• "Auckland has realised how wonderfully mining, or even the prospect of mining, benefits a town," said an authority on the subject during an interview yesterday.
"It is the same everywhere. When the prospectors get busy in the neighbourhood it is astonishing how it livens things up. Interest generally is astir. There seems something to look forward to.
"Orders come in for provisions, for implements, and probably for big machinery. It would pay cities like Dunedin for people to form their little syndicates and send prospecting parties out among the hills and gullies."
-ODT, 15.7.1909.
