Edward Townley Hardman was a geologist who discovered payable gold in Western Australia’s Kimberley District
Western Australia

As an inductee in the category of Prospectors and Discoverers, Edward Townley Hardman is recognised for his important role in the first discovery of payable gold at Halls Creek in Western Australia in 1885.

After graduating with a Diploma in Mining from the Royal College of Science in Dublin, he joined the staff of the Geological Survey of Ireland then was chosen by the Colonial Office for the position of Government Geologist in Western Australia. Hardman accompanied expeditions to the Kimberley district in the mid 1880s and after panning for gold in several watercourses, discovered the colony’s first commercial goldfield in the headwaters of the Elvire River, later to become known as Halls Creek.

During his time based in Perth, Hardman was also active in examining the geology of the South West. He is generally credited with being the first to find tin at Greenbushes and to report on the prospects for finding artesian water in the Perth area.

Hardman will always be remembered for his pioneering geological work in Western Australia leading to the first discovery of gold in the East Kimberley and to the beginnings of the State’s mining industry. The success of his work led directly to the establishment of the Geological Survey of Western Australia as the colony’s first scientific organisation.

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Tim Griffin

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Kitty Pluto was one of the most successful Aboriginal prospectors on the Cape York Peninsula, Queensland.

Aboriginal people have been involved in Australian prospecting and mining from its beginning. Aboriginal guides and assistants were as crucial to frontier prospectors as they were to explorers; their bushcraft was used to find mineralisation as well as tracks and water. On the small remote fields of the north, their labour was particularly important. Henry Reynolds cites the Mulgrave mining warden writing in 1891, that local Aborigines were “Very useful to the miners, who have so many difficulties to contend against, in a country so much broken and covered with so dense a jungle”. On the Rocky goldfield, on Cape York, local Aborigines carried in all supplies because the country was too hard for packhorses.

Aborigines also prospected and mined, either alone, or as partners or assistants of non-indigenous miners. Unfortunately, they are seriously under-documented and we know only a few of them by name. Read the rest of this entry »

Tom Flanagan was one of the prospectors whose discovery of gold in 1893 paved the way to mining in Kalgoorlie-Boulder,
Western Australia

Kalgoorlie#47; Boulder’s Golden Mile is recognised as the richest mile in the world. The gold mines and the nearby city owe their existence to the discovery of gold made by Patrick Hannan, Tom Flanagan and Dan Shea in the area in 1893.

Born in Ireland, Hannan, Flanagan and Shea had migrated to Australasia in the mid-nineteenth century. Flanagan arrived in the early 1850s and went to the fields at Bendigo in Victoria; Hannan arrived in Melbourne in 1863 and most likely went to join relatives in Ballarat; and Shea probably arrived at the end of the 1860s

By the time they came to the newly discovered fields to the east of Perth in Western Australia, all three had prospected or worked in mines in various colonies.  Read the rest of this entry »