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Huge finds of nickel and gold

Posted on August 26, 2011

THE sprightly 81-year-old has a remarkably clear memory, reeling off facts and figures about people, places and events connected to the building industry, Murray River history, outback mining, major sporting events, farming…and a host of other interesting topics from the land Down Under.

That’s Robert holding a bar of gold worth around $2.5 million.

But it’s the photographs that immediately catch the eye, and which help bring his stories to life. Images from his early days growing up on the river are in stark contrast to the 30-odd years he spent in the mining game, in some of the most remote areas of Australia.

There’s one photograph that stands out – the bloke holding a bar of gold that’s worth about $2.5 million on today’s market!

The stories from the life of Mildura’s Dennis ‘Denny’ Walker would fill a book…and that’s exactly what Denny is planning…a book based on the diaries he has filled in daily since 1952…all 59 of them!

He says a good title would be “Another Fortunate Life,” following on from the Australian classic ‘A Fortunate Life’ by the renowned A.B.Facey. It could just as well be called ‘A self-made man,’ because Dennis Walker’s life story has to be one of the most interesting and amazing ever told.

Denny spoke to the Mildura Weekly in the middle of packing up the family home to move back to West Australia to be near his children and grandkids, and the cross-Australia journey in two weeks will be the 114th time he has crossed the Nullabor!

But at least this time it will be in a late model, air-conditioned vehicle…unlike the first time back in 1968, when Dennis and a plumber mate sold up their homes in Swan Hill, packed up their families and personal possessions and drove a convoy of three trucks, panel van and caravan on a 2700-kilometre odyssey, a lot of it on rough, unmade and dusty roads.

They carried all their own fuel, in 44-gallon drums, and took 11 days to cross the country.

At times the convoy was stretched out over 140 kilometres, and breakdowns were common. One of the trucks carried seven tons of supplies. She was licensed for three!

No doubt the adventures associated with that epic journey will fill a chapter or two in Denny’s book, as will his earlier exploits in the building industry, along with his life as something of a ‘Hucklebury Finn’ in the popular days of the Murray and Darling River paddlesteamers.

There’s an important war connection also, with his Mum’s uncle the famous Albert Jacka, among the most renowned of Australia’s VC winners. Lance Corporal Jacka won his VC at Courtney’s Post, Gallipoli on May 19, 1915, after attacking and killing seven Turks to prevent an Aussie trench being overrun. Jacka returned to Australia with the rank of Captain, and became the Mayor of St Kilda.

The stories keep coming. All the way back to the early 1940’s, when Denny and his family lived on the paddleboat ‘Alpha.’ He fired his first boiler at the tender age of 12. He spent some of his teen years as a relieving ‘engineer’ on ‘The Pevensey’ as it plied the Murray River between Mildura and Morgan – the last of the regular cargo services on the Murray.

Denny recalled the capacity loads of the day…dried fruit. farm windmills, wheat, foodstuffs, wool, fuel, building supplies…not to mention hundreds of barrels of wine and brandy from the stills of Mildara Winery at Merbein.

Regular stops were made at designated spots, where woodcutters had stockpiled hundreds of tonnes of wood for the boilers of ‘The Pevensey’ and other steamers. ‘The Pevensey’ was later featured in the classic television mini-series ‘All The Rivers Run,’ under the name ‘Philadelphia.’

Denny didn’t move far from the river in his early years, and developed a good working knowledge of steam from his father Harry, a Nottingham, UK, steam engineer. His mother was Ruth L’Hotellier, nee Duryea-Walker, of Balranald. Denny said he was seven years old when his Dad left home, and it had such an impact on his life that he developed a severe speech impediment, something that stayed with him until he joined the Freemasons many years later.

Growing up on the river, loading and unloading the paddlesteamers, cutting posts and sleepers, firing the boilers and helping navigate the tricky waters of the Murray, young Denny still found time for his favourite sports of rowing and cycling, and was a frequent competitor in the many events of the day.

He roughly estimates that he travelled more than 40,000 kilometres up and down the river in those early years, while also, in 1943, starting work as a apprentice builder with an uncle, Leo Duryea. Three years later, around the time the fighter training base at Mildura Airport was being converted to a country branch of Melbourne University, Denny got a job with the contractor, A.V.Jennings.

Soon after that, Denny got a job with the old State Rivers and Water Supply Commission, working on the Soldier Settlement Scheme at Robinvale and helping build the district’s first pumping station.

Female company was less than scarce around Robinvale, so every Friday, Denny and his mates would head off to Mildura, on the then unmade, rough and dusty Sturt Highway, to be with their girlfriends. The weekend would finish with a dance on the Showboat Avoca on the Sunday night. Denny even recalls the makes of their motorbikes…his was either a 500 BSA WWD or an Aerial Square Four 1000, and others were on a Triumph 500 Speed Twin, A Velosette OHC 500, and a 350 Triumph.

Mildura was where he met his girlfriend, Lillian Lush, who worked at Mildura Base Hospital. When Lillian went to work in Adelaide, Denny followed, and recalls working on various building projects in the city, along with the giant freighters that pulled into the Largs Bay terminal. He also remembers working on the luxury yacht of wool tycoon J.McGregor. It was worth 25,000 Pounds, a hefty sum in those days.

Denny and some friends were then offered work in Geelong, and it was about this time he developed a love of prospecting, spending weekends on digs around Mt Doran, Elaine and Meredith. After returning to Adelaide, Denny and Lillian came back to Mildura to get married, and Denny helped build the Dareton branch of the Mildura Packing Shed, and the pumping station, as well as work on stations up the Anabranch and Darling Rivers.

Then it was off to Robinvale for work on the hotel and Post Office, before teaming up with Vern Ridley to work on Soldier Settlement housing. They built the final house of that lengthy project. Denny then teamed up with other partners, and built more houses along the Murray River, before returning to Robinvale to build homes for the Victorian Housing Commission.

They were framing the fifth house when Denny copped a three-inch nail in his eye. It was months before he could return to work, and he says it took a long time before he could work propertly, with only one good eye, and he often worked 12 and 13-hour days to compensate.

In 1968 he and a friend, John Milnes, heard about some land being opened up in WA, so off they went to investigate. There were 30 farm blocks on offer around Ravensthorpe, between Albany and Esperence, but there were 300 applicants, so they missed out. But they liked the look of the region, there was a copper mine that employed 120 personnel…not many tradesmen, so they returned home to get their families and personal possessions, and made that epic journey with the trucks, car and van.

When they had settled into the Ravensthorpe Caravan Park, Denny said he and John had so much work thrown their way it was embarrassing. Most of the work was at the copper mine, but eventually other mines from a wide area called on their building and maintenance skills.

They didn’t get much time off, but one day Denny and Lillian were going for a drive off the beaten track when they noticed a ‘strike’ of the mineral sepentinite. Denny took some samples and had them assayed in the mine laboratory, and to everyone’s surprise they gave a reading of about one percent nickel. As Denny said, it was to be the start of a very busy life.

It was the early 1970’s, and the amateur prospectors went on to discover four different lodes of nickel, starting a mine at Forrestania, later taken over by the giant Finnish company Outokumpu, and which is now being mined by ‘Western Areas Mining.’
Pegging their claims was time-consuming, tedious and often back-breaking work, but it was to have its rewards. The first eight claims, each embracing 300 acres, cost $1800 to peg out, but within six months they received an offer of $20,000 for the lot, plus 80,000 shares that were then valued at 50 cents each.

A few months later, 75 kilometres away, Denny pegged another seven claims. This time the offer was $90,000, plus another heap of shares. As Denny said; “It was certainly better than the $3 an hour we were getting as builders.”

More claims…and more offers…followed. denny cut another dozen 300 acre claims a bit closer to Ravensthorpe, followed by a further 22, and eventually held the licence for about 3500 acres. By this stage he was dealing with ‘The Big Boys,’ including Amex, BHP and Alan Bond, and as Denny says; “That really set me up …I took the next 24 years off.”

That didn’t stop some of the biggest companies in the world beating a path to his door, with offers to head their prospecting teams on a full-time basis, even to far-away places in Papua New Guinea, Malaysia and the Philippines. Denny says he knocked them all back.

He stayed in the West for the next 30 years, helping Lillian raise a family of five kids – four boys and a girl. His four sons have followed him into the mining game, all in WA, and Denny says now is the time to go back to the West to be near them in his later years.

Denny points out that although he “took some time off” because of his mining success, he wasn’t exactly idle. He and Lillian operated a motel for a year for a friend who had marriage issues, then they took on a Caltex roadhouse for a year, cleared and farmed a 3600 acre property, took over the Ravensthorpe Caravan Park for eight years from 1980, did some copper mining and developed their own gold mine, including a full treatment works.

It grew to the stage where it employed Denny and all four sons, plus another five locals, and was so successful that they were pouring a bar of gold every three weeks.

Denny isn’t saying when the family made from their copper, nickel and gold adventures, royalities from various companies or shares…we’ll all just have to wait until his book is published.

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