The Bermingham Family
by Pat Callahan
Eastern Australia was experiencing a depression in the 1890s. At the end of 1894 when he was nineteen, James Bermingham or Jas as he was called, sailed for Fremantle in Western Australia. After settling in and slowly getting his gear together, Jas and a mate took the train to Southern Cross where in those days the railway stopped. The two loaded their belongings on a wheelbarrow and walked the 110 miles to Coolgardie, arriving in early 1895.
Arthur Bayley and William Ford had discovered gold on Fly Flat’s just east of the present town in 1892. People flocked to the areas around Coolgardie in the hope of a better life. Jas was one of those. At first, these mining towns were a collection of tents. The miners would cut a pile of saplings and cover it with hessian or whatever he could find including kerosene tins and packing cases. They slept on camp stretchers and made bush tables and chairs for furniture. Slowly the lean to morphed into hessian huts, which used milled timber and as the women arrived, slowly acquired the trappings of civilization. If you struck it rich you moved into more permanent and sturdier accommodation.
Bayley Street, Coolgardie 1894 – Photo SLWA
However, while some found gold, many only found hardship, sickness and death caused by inadequate housing, lack of fresh water and food, and insufficient medical attention and supplies. Despite early setbacks, within a decade Coolgardie’s population had grown to an amazing sixteen thousand people. The town had been formally named in 1893 and became a municipality the following year. The Post Office opened the year Jas arrived and the following year, Coolgardie had electric lights and a swimming pool. But conditions were extremely primitive, and in 1895 a typhoid epidemic broke out that killed over two thousand.
It was an amazing transformation of a piece of no man’s land. The year after Jas arrived the railway was extended from Southern Cross and by the end of the decade Coolgardie was the third biggest town in Western Australia after Perth and Fremantle. There were two stock exchanges, three breweries, six newspapers, sixty stores, twenty-six hotels and many churches and public buildings. The streets were incredibly wide to accommodate the teams of camel trains that bought food and water for the diggings. The rich history of the Afghan cameleers is a fascinating story in its own right.
By 1897, the level of enthusiasm about the potential of the region was such that over seven hundred mining companies had been floated in London. The water pipeline arrived in 1903 and a year earlier the town had seen the construction of the State Battery. Over the following years, miners spread out all over the country from Wiluna in the north to the rich 1894 discovery at Norseman and east to Laverton, Niagara, Kanowna and hundred’s of other little settlements and claims. The richest of all finds and the most enduring, was some forty kilometres east of Coolgardie, at Kalgoorlie. Here in 1893, Paddy Hannan and friends discovered the ‘mile that Midas touched.’ By 1901 the State’s population had increased fourfold and a third of them were on the goldfields.
Paddy Hannan was born in County Clare in 1843 and came to Australia five years before John Bermingham in 1862. He worked in the Ballarat goldfields and in New Zealand before coming to WA in 1889. He mined at Southern Cross and Coolgardie and in June 1893 went east to Kalgoorlie. He and his mates Tom Flannagan and Dan Shea found 109 oz. of gold nuggets in two days and the rush was on.
Jas Bermingham didn’t stay in Coolgardie long. He became friendly with a prospector called Mick Alves whose parents had a carting business in town. In December 1898 Mick’s brother Dan was arrested along with the Mayor of Kanowna Tom Doyle and a certain Chas Cutbush, for murdering a man in a street fight. They were all acquitted the following April when it was shown that even though there had been a disagreement, the man, had died when he slipped and hit his head on the pavement.
Jas obtained a block at 316 Dugan Street in Kalgoorlie and for a time worked as a fencing contractor. There are numerous advertisements in the Kalgoorlie Miner from July 1896, asking the public requiring residential fencing to apply to J Bermingham. Kalgoorlie was expanding at a crazy rate. High-quality infrastructure was being built with, for example, the magnificent Palace Hotel on the corner of Hannans Street and Boulder Road being opened in 1897.
Kalgoorlie Miner 12 August 1896, page 3
Prospectors were heading off into the bush with new finds being announced on almost a daily basis. During the 1890s, places like Leonora with its famous Sons of Gwalia mine, Laverton, Davyhurst, Mulline, Mt Ida, Kookynie, Niagara, Yarri, Yerilla and Edjudina were all a hive of industry. Herbert Hoover, who was to become President of the United States in 1929, was the mining engineer at Gwalia during 1897-8.
Jas and Mick Alves later took up a mining lease on the Adeline Lead, an alluvial gold area halfway between Kalgoorlie and Boulder. Jas did well and made good money from the venture. Imagine twenty-five thousand miners crammed into an area a few kilometres square. It was bedlam. If you didn’t find gold, and many didn’t, you starved or eked out an existence working for sustenance wages. There was quite a bit of conflict between the alluvial miners who were restricted under the ‘ten foot rule’ to only working the top three metres and the deep miners who had access to the rest. In mid-March 1899 a group of alluvial miners pegged some surface tenements on the Adeline Lease.
They had rushed there when a man called O’Cleary and his partners, who had sunk a twenty-metre shaft and put in an eight-metre drive, said they had found good results. There was quite a fracas and Sub-Inspector Bob O’Connell, who went on to become Commissioner of Police was caught in the middle of the trouble. O’Connell and his constables arrested men who had taken some of the surface ore. John Finnerty the Mining Warden from Coolgardie was transferred to Kalgoorlie in 1900 to try to rationalise the myriad of leases that were being pegged each week.
Years later in a long letter from the Two Boys gold mine in Higginsville to the Kalgoorlie Miner of the 13 March 1947, Jas recalled that he “… had an interest in a claim on the Adeline Lease and worked the lead under the Boulder Block Road near the junction of the Boulder town Road. We were not involved in the trouble on the lead, as we were the first party to get on gold below the Boulder Road and secured a tribute from the Company (Great Boulder Mines). The company refused other miners who pegged the ground, and the row started. I was there on the Sunday morning when the miners pushed aside the police who were guarding the wash dirt in the ore paddock and carted it away in drays.”
There were regular ‘rollups’ to try and sort through the problems. At one such event the Premier of Western Australia, Sir John Forrest, came up from Perth to speak at a rally. He received a rather noisy and unfriendly reception and was jostled and poked with an umbrella on the Kalgoorlie station. The press had a field day.
Around the turn of the century, many of the men on the goldfields had their religious needs serviced from the capital. Fr. Patrick Clune a Redemptorist whom Bishop Matthew Gibney had bought to Western Australia in 1878, was renowned for his stirring preaching and his manly character. When Gibney resigned in 1910 to return to Rome, Clune was made Bishop and then three years later Archbishop of Perth.
In 1900, Jas married his neighbour, Catherine Ann Downey, before Father Phelan in St Mary’s Kalgoorlie. Cate as she was generally called was a year younger than Jas and was born in Grenfell, New South Wales in 1874. Her parents were John Downey (1839-1919) and Mary Ann Palmer (1847-1935) She had two brothers, William and John, and a sister Mary Ellen.
Grenfell was the hometown of Henry Lawson. Gold was discovered there in 1860 and immediately attracted the likes of bushranger Ben Hall. He and his gang rampaged through the district from 1863 until his death in a hail of bullets in May 1865. In 1866 the population was over ten thousand but by the time Cate was born it was well below three thousand because the surface alluvial deposits had been worked out.
The Downey family moved to the Goldfields and lived almost in the centre of Kalgoorlie on Dugan Street. Cate’s father John died in 1919 and her mother Mary Ann in 1935. Both are buried in the Kalgoorlie Cemetery. Cate had a dressmaking business on the corner of Cassidy and Dugan Streets. She was a board member and very active in the St Mary’s Literary and Social Society which met in St Mary’s Hall next to the Catholic Church in Brookman Street.
Interestingly there were at least three other Downey men in Kalgoorlie at the time. In a photo in the book ‘Those Were the Day’, there is an image of Dan, Mick and Bill Downey, which shows the three together. It says the men were unrelated and that strangely all had had lost their middle finger on their right hand. Whether they were related to Cate is not known.
The Downey Trio – Northern Producer and Morawa and District Advertiser 1 December 1934, page 5
In October 1902, not long after Jas and Cate were married, C.Y. O’Connor the brilliant Irish engineer from County Meath, completed his five hundred and fifty-seven kilometre pipeline to bring fresh water all the way from Mundaring Weir east of Perth to the Golden Mile. O’Conner had left Ireland in 1865 and settled in New Zealand where he married and had seven children. In 1891 Premier John Forrest had recruited him to build the Fremantle Harbour and a series of other ports along the long Western Australian coastline.
The Opening of the Goldfields Water Pipeline at Mt Charlotte Kalgoorlie – Photo SLWA
When he first proposed his innovative system for getting water into the desert, O’Conner was ridiculed across the board. Finally, his vision was approved in 1898 and water began to flow into the Mt Charlotte Reservoir in January 1903. Due to the intense pressure from the media and his detractors, O’Connor rode his horse into the surf just south of Fremantle in March of the previous year and shot himself. The beach at North Coogee is now named after him and a statue erected in his honour. Despite the tragedy of this whole affair, the arrival of fresh cheap water to the Goldfields was a godsend. It changed the lives of thousands of people who had grown up on strict rationing and the town prospered.
On 7 October 1902, Jas and Cate welcomed their first son, John Patrick, at the Dugan Street home in Kalgoorlie. At the end of the month, they took the newborn back to Victoria and settled at Nambrok, sixteen kilometres northeast of Rosedale. Jas purchased blocks in the Nambrok Estate to the east in 1902. Lot 40 some ten hectares was bought for about $5 a hectare. After the auction, he then paid J. Mills $6.80 a hectare for lots 26-29 totalling some 350 hectares. In his will of May 1947, he listed seven properties of nearly 600 hectares that he owned at that time.
Jas was a successful farmer and gradually acquired other properties in the area. But the fires of Black Monday in early February 1913 almost wiped out the Bermingham holdings. Fire raged across the district and many farms were burnt out. One outcome of this tragedy was that the Birmingham’s decided to start the local fire brigade. In March 2011, the local fire engine was still parked next to the house at the top of the drive.
Jas and Cate had ten more children after John Patrick – Eileen Mary (b1902), Gwendoline Margaret (b1904), James Eric (b1905), Edward (b1907), Katherine Annie (b1909), Francis William (b1910), Albert Thomas (b 1912), Brendan Doyle (b1914), Alma Josephine (b 1916) and Peter who died at birth in 1918.
Alma was born at Traralgon some thirty-five kilometres south west of Nambrok on 31 March 1916. She was later to marry Jack Callahan in 1938 and was born in the middle of the Great War. Some fifty young men from the district had volunteered to serve overseas, but all of the Berminghams were either too young or needed to stay on the land for their family’s sake.
Jas sold one of his Nambrok properties to Charlie Newton. And he and Cate moved most of the family back to Western Australia. This was quite an undertaking in those days and you can imagine the emotion, as a close-knit family who had lived side by side for years, were to be separated by a continent. Jas took his family down to Melbourne to attended his daughter Gwen’s marriage to John O’Connell and immediately after the church service boarded the train for Western Australia. They acquired land at Baandee and farmed there.
In 1931 Jas went prospecting for gold around Larkinville and Widgiemooltha and was joined a few months later by his son Bert. Larkinville was the area where in early 1931, sixteen-year-old Jimmy Larcombe had found the Golden Eagle. It was the largest nugget ever found in Western Australia weighing in at a staggering 1,135 ozs and took two men to lift it. In today’s money it would have been worth over two million dollars.
At the end of that year, the two Berminghams moved to Higginsville and found some solid traces of gold. Jas went back to Baandee packed up his family and walked off the land leaving his auto header with the Spillman’s and the seed drill with the Cuolahan’s.
The following article appeared in the Western Mail of 11 February 1932.
A meeting of the Baandee Branch of the CWA was held over on 14 January. Mrs Spillman presided over a good attendance. Mrs C Bermingham and Mrs Goodier each made donations of books to the club library. Afternoon tea was served to the wheat growers who were holding a meeting in the adjoining hall. On 18 January members met in the clubrooms to say farewell to Mrs Bermingham and her daughter who are leaving the district. After competitions and afternoon tea, Mrs Spillman expressed her regret that the branch was losing two such splendid members and asked Mrs Birch and Mrs Lindquist to present baskets of handkerchiefs to the guests.
Kathleen and Jack Spillman stayed on in Baandee until 1940 when they moved to Norseman. Alma’s brother Ted and his wife Doris moved from Baandee to Merredin and then down to Higginsville in the same year as Kathleen and Jack. After a few months Ted went shearing and wheat carting north of Perth until he joined the army in 1942.
The Bermingham’s started work on two diggings and found good colour in both. At seven meters in one shaft they found a meter-wide reef that showed visible gold. The adjoining Two Boys Mine was a new deposit that was named for the two young men who had discovered the reef. It was taken over under option to purchase by the newly formed Wavic Gold Development Company which was started in Melbourne in 1933. That company also had the Sons of Freedom Mine at Bulumwaal about thirty kilometres from Bairnsdale in Gippsland and The New Brilliant and The Surprise mines in Higginsville.
The Wavic Company did very well out of the Two Boys mine. Local newspapers reported on the amazing tonnage that went through Norseman and Coolgardie crushing plants. So successful was their operation, that they installed a five-stamp battery and processing plant of their own. For some odd reason at the end of 1934, they closed down and let the whole of the mine on tribute to Jas Bermingham. He operated on the surface of ore bodies from one to two metres wide with highly payable results from his crushings.
Five head Fraser & Chalmer stamp battery erected by the Wavic Co.
in 1933 & ‘Tin Lizzie’ at Two Boys Mine Higginsville – Photo SLWA
Today, there is nothing much there except some old ruins and a couple of very successful new mines adjacent to the rail crossing. The miners of old in 1933 & ‘Tin Lizzie’ at Two Boys Mine Higginsville had no idea of the riches that lay well below their feet. But eighty years ago, Higginsville, some fifty-five kilometres north of Norseman, was one of the many little settlements along the road to Widgiemooltha and Coolgardie, where people had found traces of gold and were busy trying to make their fortune.
The population given by the State Statistician in the Kalgoorlie Miner of 27 July 1932 was twelve males, two females and three children. But at one stage of its development, there were over two thousand residents. Higginsville was named after the well-known prospector Patrick Higgins who discovered gold in the area late in 1905. He was also the first to find gold at Mulwarrie, which also became a prosperous town. He and Graham Price pegged a number of tenements one of which was called the Sons of Erin. As always, being so close to Lake Cowan (salt lake) water was at a premium. The nearest supply was at Pioneer Rock some twenty kilometres away.
The town was gazetted in November 1907. There were over one hundred one thousand square metre blocks and five streets viz. Erin Street, which ran along the railway line as well as Price, Ellis, Greiger, and Higgins Streets. Paddy Higgins was the fifth son of John Higgins of Nannup and was a relative of Mick Higgins, who was to become Grannie Callahan’s second husband. Paddy died in Geraldton in 1924.
Lone prospectors and travellers would call into the many condensers dotted along the side of Lake Cowan and Lake Lefroy. Most complained that the water was still salty even after it had been purified, but they were still forced to pay a premium anyway.
SUCCESSFUL BALL TO ASSIST HIGGINSVILLE
Sunday Times Sunday 1 August 1937
The dining room of the Widgiemooltha Hotel was filled last Saturday night week when a plain and fancy dress ball was held to augment the funds to erect a hall in Higginsville. Music was supplied by Miss Kirwin and Messers P O’Callaghan and F Sale. Visitors from Eundyne Paris and Pioneer helped swell the crowd from Widgie and Higginsville to spend an enjoyable night.
Prizewinning costumes were – Best dressed woman & man: Mrs Medlen and J Mcmahon. Other costumes included Mrs Halbert Pirette, Mrs E Bermingha, Inkeeper’s daughter, Mrs J P Bermingham, Father Christmas, Mrs Spillman Eastern Woman, Miss A Bermingham Queen Katherine, Miss Myers Harlequin, Miss Stockton Dutch Girl, JP Bermingham and F Sale Two Black Crows, B Searle, Harem Lady.
In those days there were still almost no bitumen roads and water was always in short supply. Chicken hawks, crows, large snakes, foxes, rats and other pests made life difficult for the inhabitants. During one heat wave, the temperature was over forty-three degrees Celsius for almost a week.
Bakery and Post Office Higginsville – Photo SLWA
When Jack Callahan arrived in Higginsville in January 1936, there were only eighty people there. The most prominent public building in this small settlement was the little Post Office and general store, which was in the front room of the bakery operated by John Brusco. The general store was run by Baptiste Milesi and his wife Catherine. Milesi, who was one of the few long-term residents who had come to the area at the beginning of the century and over the years had developed a copper mine at Dawdy to the west of Higginsville as well as a number of other mining interests. They were Catholics and visiting priests often stayed with them as they did with Jas and Cate in later years.
The telephone was connected to the Post Office in November 1939, which opened this little settlement to the world. Mrs Milesi died in late 1943 and her husband passed away the following year. On his death, the Postal Inspector, Mr Cousins, handed the postal duties over to Cate Bermingham. The telephone line was extended and a small office was built beside the main house at the Two Boys mine. The Kalgoorlie Miner of 20 September 1944 reported that ‘a strong working bee to assist in clearing the track for the erection of the poles etc. was completed in record time between Monday morning and mid-day Thursday.’ At the town Christmas party, Boxing Day 1947, Cate was presented with a silver cake stand for her work in running the Post Office.
Town Plan of Higginsville – Photo SLWA
In the mid-1930s, most of the supplies and equipment for Higginsville were trucked down from the store at Widgiemooltha. Good drinking water was always in short supply as the average rainfall was only two hundred and sixty millimetres. Supplies of the ‘liquid gold’, were bought down by train from the Railway Dam at Coolgardie. Jas had a Furphy water cart and was able to get extra water from the nearby Pioneer Dam some twenty kilometres away. Things improved at the end of 1936 when the pipeline from Coolgardie was extended to Norseman.
The population of the Eastern Goldfields was reasonably fluid as people came to make their fortunes and then either left in disappointment or followed new discoveries further out. It was also a volatile environment with a high percentage of desperate men. However, the Bermingham’s seemed happy and were beginning to prosper. The Western Argus newspaper of 18 August 1936 records that the Mining Warden allocated two other mining leases (5225 and 5226) at Higginsville to Jas and his eldest son John Patrick. In Jas’s will, he also states that he had a half interest with his son John in Leases 5293 and 5710. He owned Water Rights 561 and 563, the tailing area No 104, three horses, one dray and two trucks.
The main mine was still showing good colour and with most of the boys working there, it was a good producer. Jas and Cate had a large house with wide verandas at the top of a small hill. There was a well with good water and an extensive garden. Just before his death in 2012, John Spillman, who lived with his family in Higginsville before they moved to Norseman, said he could remember the large dinning room, the immense table and the happy environment.
In 1937 a year after Jack arrival, Higginsville’s population reached a hundred. The following year after significant fundraising, the locals built the Higginsville Hall with galvanised iron walls and roof. Unlike most of the houses in the settlement, the Hall had a wooden floor. It soon became the centre of community activities and the place where dances and concerts could be held.
After a series of busy bees, the Bermingham boys built two tennis courts out of termite nests which when crushed and compacted were as hard as concrete. Alma and Jack, who was called Jack Cally to distinguish him from Jack Spillman, were both good tennis players and never missed an opportunity to be on the court. The Higginsville club regularly travelled up to Widgiemooltha to play there and relax after at the Widgie pub, which was the only watering hole between Coolgardie and Norseman.
Higginsville also had a very strong football team as most of the Bermingham boys had played in other competitions. They were big-framed men who played the game hard. The matches against Widgiemooltha were very competitive, hard-fought affairs played on a red dust oval. Regardless of who won or lost, it was all sorted out at the pub after the game with the celebrations often going late into the night.
Catherine Ann and James Doyle Bermingham at Higginsville
Alma’s brother Brendan, who was not quite two years her senior, was a very skilful player and went to play for Mines Rovers in the Goldfields League, eventually being elected their captain. In 1936 Brendan went up to play for Claremont in the Western Australian Football League and played forty-nine matches with them. Brendan and his brother Bert, who also played for Mines Rovers, were both picked in the team to play South Australia in August 1937. Brendan captained the side and the team won by twenty-seven points in front of a huge crowd of seven thousand five hundred at the Kalgoorlie Oval. Bert also starred in the ruck in the combined Goldfield’s win over Port Adelaide in July 1939. Brendan’s greatest achievement was a standout performance in the unbeatable 1938-1939 Claremont Premiership team.
1939 Claremont Premiership Team. Brendan 3rd from left in 3rd row
Radiating out to the west from Norseman and Higginsville towards Red Hill, was an intricate system of woodlines. With the timber required to line shafts and stopes, run the steam boilers and condensers and provide lumber for buildings and cooking fires etc., the country was quickly denuded. The diversity of fauna and flora suffered dramatically. Many of the catchment areas that were built on the large rocks from Bulla Bulling, Burra and Dundas, supplied the locomotives and men that worked on the woodlines. At first, this is where Jack worked. He had a contract to supply timber and as an experienced axeman was well capable of a substantial throughput and good returns.
Just after the Berminghams arrived, Fr. C Cunningham was in charge of Norseman until Fr. Grennan arrived in January 1938. Ed Grennan had come to Norseman in January 1938 and was responsible for all the Catholics between Widgiemooltha in the north, to Esperance on the south coast. In January 1940 he went back to Ireland and Fr. Michael Philbin took over until the middle of 1944. Alma used to tell the story of Fr. Philbin when he was in Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie some 150 kilometres north. He would ride down to Norseman once a month on his horse to say mass at the various little out-stations along the way. It was a Church requirement in those days, that if you wanted to receive communion, you had to fast from both food and water as of midnight the night before. This was a terrible and even life-threatening burden for outback priests, who covered long distances on horseback in extremely hot and dry conditions.
Father Philbin would ride up to the Bermingham’s, say mass for the mostly Irish congregation and then down a half gallon of water and a large bowl of preserved fruit. He would sleep for a few hours, and play poker for the rest of the day and half the night, before riding on. Bishop Redmond Prendiville used to also stay with the Bermingham’s when he was passing through. He later became the Archbishop of Perth in 1935.
Laurie Sinclair, who was originally from the Shetland Islands, had founded Norseman. He had arrived in Australia with his parents in late 1864. He at first worked with the Dempster brothers as they were opening up the land around Esperance, but then decided to try his hand at prospecting. He had no luck in Coolgardie but while heading back to the south coast in 1884, found some specks of alluvial gold in a small gully.
During the night his horse ‘Norseman’ was unsettled and pawed the ground around his tether. The next morning Sinclair discovered that his horse had uncovered a reef of gold during the night. The rich mines that followed created a boomtown. Sinclair and his partner George Allsop sold out to Harolds, a South Australian company, for over twelve thousand dollars. This was the equivalent to three-quarters of a million dollars in today’s money. By the turn of the century Norseman had a post office, two banks, two newspapers, three churches, a Masonic hall, two general stores and five hotels. Carriage mail was introduced and was carried by Cobb and Co coaches. A town reservoir that held over eleven million litres was also built. In the first few years of the 1900s two breweries, two halls a magistrate and warden’s court and three more shops were commissioned. By 1909 the railway arrived from Coolgardie and a six hundred capacity theatre was built.
After a few months as a contract cutter, Jack went prospecting with Grannie’s brother, his uncle Fred Rowcroft. Fred had been in Noggerup and also worked at ‘Quongup’ when Jack was growing up so Jack knew him pretty well. When WWII started, Fred joined the Army and after basic training went to Greece. Fred was captured during the German invasion of Crete and was reported as a prisoner of war in November 1941. He was held prisoner in Poland at Stalag 21 and a member of the escape committee. He was able to escape himself once but was recaptured within a few weeks. Fred died in very strange circumstances when his house burnt down at Mt Helena in 1963.
In July 1942, Bert Bermingham’s wife Ettie and her family moved to Boulder as Bert had joined the Australian Imperial Force (AIF). The Callahan and Spillman families also left Norseman later the same year, because both Jacks had also enlisted. Once the hostilities were over, some of the men returned to work at the Two Boys mine before moving on to other careers.
Cate Bermingham died in the Norseman Hospital on 13 July 1946 and is buried in the Norseman cemetery.
BERMINGHAM – On July 13 at Norseman, Catherine ‘Cate’ Ann beloved wife of James Bermingham of Higginsville, loving mother of John, Eileen (Mrs Sheil), Gwen (Mrs O’Connell), Eric, Edward, Kathleen (Mrs Spillman), Frank, Bert, Brendon, Alma (Mrs Callahan), beloved grandmother of 24 grandchildren, aged 70 years.
Eighteen months later, while Jas was visiting family in Victoria, he died in Melbourne. Cate’s body was exhumed in August 1950 and returned to Gippsland to be buried beside her husband in the Sale Cemetery near quite a number of other family members.
Higginsville slowly sunk into a twenty-year hiatus only to be resurrected in a limited way by the 70s nickel boom. While it had been a great asset for the family and had helped the children get on in life, the full riches of the area as Jas had always suspected had yet to be discovered.
Today there are quite a few mining operations around Higginsville including Alacer Mining and Advoca Resources which owns the Two Boys site. At today’s current price of about thirteen hundred dollars per ounce, there was still a lot of wealth below their feet. But the old folk had no way of knowing the untold riches that lay in the deep veins and in those days didn’t have the technology to access it. What they did have was a desire to grow from the hand-to-mouth environment that the majority of the working class of their generation experienced to something that was a little more secure for them and their families. Hard work, some privation and a sense of loyalty and cooperation were but stepping stones along the way.
That Jas and Cate had relocated to the other side of the continent twice, had farmed both in Victoria and the wheat belt, run successful mining ventures, raised a very large family and shown the courage and initiative to succeed, were traits that many of the Bermingham and Spillman siblings inherited.
Moya Sharp
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