The Gallant Mrs Taylor – a woman in a mans game

From The Sunday Times -Perth, Sunday 9 June 1940

Mining for gold is usually looked upon as a mans game in which muscle and endurance are needed to wrest the gold-bearing stone from the earth and to keep the machinery moving. It calls for grit, a brave heart and the ability to withstand all the disappointments of the elusive search.

But out on the goldfields bush, 40 miles west of Menzies, a woman is showing that the “weaker sex” can be mine owners, too, and that manning a battery is not the exclusive work of man. This gallant woman is Mrs Mabel Taylor, who owns  the Mabel Gertrude Mine, at Morley’s Find, and takes her turn at operating the small battery on the property. Mrs Taylor’s  husband, James Alexander Wilson Taylor, and a mate discovered the mine and worked it until Mr Taylor died about two years ago aged on 34yrs. Undaunted by this tragic blow, when only married six years ago, the wife carried on the huge task of extracting the gold from the reef.

Mrs Mabel Jean Taylor nee Black

Today she is probably Western Australia’s only woman mine owner. Her mine is worked to a depth of 900ft and has yielded valuable cushing’s,  “About 800 oz” was her reply to a question concerning the quantity of gold she has taken out in the past eighteen months.

Mrs. Taylor has two miners in her employ, but she looks upon the running of the battery as her special job. The engine which operates the three-head stamp battery also provides electric light for Mrs. Taylor’s neat little home fifty yards or so away. She watches the running of the treatment plant, seeing that the gold-bearing stone is feeding properly to the stamps and in between this does her household work and the cooking of meals.

There was a time when engines and batteries were a deep mystery to her, and she recalls an occasion when all her efforts to “start-up” the engine failed. “They thought that this was one job a woman couldn’t do” she related with a smile of satisfaction, “but I learned the knack next morning, and now it’s an easy job.”

And although Mrs. Taylor is “on gold”, she had many a struggle against the obstacles associated with life outback There is the cartage of food and supplies …. even water … and the operation of the mine has required many trips into Kalgoorlie, 125 miles away.

One night she had a five mile walk when something went amiss with the truck: another time she had to complete the last sixty miles of the journey home by foot, when a bad blow out occurred. But through it all this gallant woman has “kept her chin up”. She has mined the gold her husband found, and has displayed that endurance and grit that makes the Australian woman of the outback such a fine personality.

Not that she has always been away from the bright lights of the city and the conveniences associated with the modern city home. She travelled extensively while her husband was alive and has brushed shoulders with London’s millions and participated in the gayness of Blackpool. In fact, she made her home in England for seven years. Today, she carries on nobly where her husband left off, her mine, the Mabel Gertrude-named after her mother, contributing a small but useful contribution to the States wealth.