There is romance is the story of Paddy Hannan, a personal success story of the highest order, if credit be given to those who have written of his life. He was a quietly-spoken man; one who took the rough with the smooth; who labored long and hard, but gained little material reward for his effort.
If it be a success story, it must lie in the fact that he led others to great wealth and fortune; who envied no one, and died as he had lived, respected by all who knew him.
He was born in Ireland in 1842, a time of great depression and hunger in that land. When fabulous gold discoveries were made in Victoria, Australia, in the 1850s and onwards, he and his family sailed for Melbourne. Paddy Hannan was soon working underground in the mines at Ballarat, learning the hard trade of the practical miner. For the rest of his life he followed the gold rushes wherever they led him. He worked for years in the Eastern Australian Colonies, across the Tasman Sea to New Zealand in its golden era, and finally sailed across the Great Australian Bight to Western Australia. He became known as a drifter, always moving on when the “Call” came, unobtrusively a part of every new strike. It was only natural for him to follow the lure of gold over yet another horizon when the news of Bailey and Ford’s Find was heralded far and wide. He was then fifty years of age, but his faith demanded that he would one day make a magnificent strike!
He drew into partnership two fellow-Irishmen, secured a full mining outfit, two horses, water bags and provisions for the first stage of the inward trail. The party headed for Coolgardie, then in its first feverish birth pangs, and were dismayed at the reckless movement of men and their animals, and the filthy conditions under which they existed in their search for gold. The Irishman would have none of it, and continued their journey for another twenty-five trackless miles. When one of their two horses cast a shoe, the party pulled aside to care for its needs. While they waited, they prospected for gold, and with that unpredictable luck of the game, near a slight escarpment close by they spied the gleam of the precious metal. Paddy Hannan’s day had arrived – every omen pointed that way.
With a supply of gold nuggets in his pouch the old miner immediately retraced the distance the party had covered, and on the post outside the Warden’s tent in Coolgardie tacked Reward Claims in the name of himself and his two partners. The combined claims measured almost three-quarters of an acre, an alluvial claim then being seventy feet by seventy. The claims covered what was later known as Mount Charlotte, Maritana and Cassity Hills, destined to become the heartland of a great city, where over the coming ninety years ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands of feet would tread.
When the news of Paddy Hannan’s gold strike was noised abroad there was the usual rush of prospectors, miners, dry-blowers, pegging leases as near as possible to those of Hannan. The crowds, the chaos, horrified the Irishmen as they worked. Despite their hopes, it was not a rich Find, not the glitz and glamour that followed the Coolgardie strike. Weary and not well, Hannan traveled to Melbourne to rest awhile, leaving his mates to prospect further in the hope of finding reef gold. Within a month or two he returned to his find, to discover every inch of land studded with mining pegs and potholes. Disgusted, Hannan headed “further out,” making for another gold field, Menzies, after transferring to his mates one-half of his allotment.
It was the irony of Fate that Paddy Hannan had placed no importance on low, gray-green rising ground some three to four miles to the South East of the land that he had pegged. That was to be his legacy to the lucky ones already on the field. It proved to be an incredible legacy, after a few years symbolized in the smokestacks, head frames and high slime dumps of the Associated Mines of the Golden Mile, the richest mile – in fact almost three square miles – of gold-bearing land on earth! Tantalus-like, it had eluded Paddy Hannan’s grasp.
After the claims of the three Irishmen had been disallowed by the government, Paddy Hannan was granted a life pension of £150 a year. At last the bachelor Irishman left the gold fields forever, to retire with his sister in Melbourne. There he died in the year 1925 at the age of eighty-three.
One of the finest epithets ever written in honor of a pioneer of the west appeared in the “Perth Sunday Times.” It read:
“So Paddy Hannan has gone to his fathers! It will be a slow broadcasting on the mulga wireless; the smokestacks of the old fossickers will take the sad news to the uttermost ends of the gold field of Australia and New Zealand, and wherever men search gold. The annals of our gold fields’ history will ever remember at the pinnacle of the Role of Honor the name of Patrick Hannan, the discoverer of the richest gold field in the world, to which came in an incredibly short time the most cosmopolitan crowd that gold ever beckoned from the far corners of the earth….”
In the year 1929 a block of granite was set in place in front of the Kalgoorlie Town Hall in Hannan Street. A bronze statue of a man sits comfortably on that rock, an old hat jammed tightly on his head, shading his watery eyes from the hot Kalgoorlie sun. On his lap rests a water bag, which, at the light touch of a foot pedal, sends an upward burst of life-giving water. It is a fitting memorial to one whose name became a legend, yet the man of the legend was virtually unrecognized and unknown, save to a few of his old mining cronies. Vale, Patrick Hannan vale!
