Why gold always glitters for mining legend Ron Manners
Decades after running mining companies, Ron Manners, 87, is now pursuing his passion for free market economics. But nothing will compare to pouring his first gold bar.
Ron Manners’ life changed forever one pitch-black evening on the highway between Kalgoorlie and Esperance in regional Western Australia when he was just 17 years old.
“I was driving with my parents when I saw the headlights of a truck approaching. Suddenly its lights went out and we didn’t have any idea that they had overhanging machinery on the back of the truck. It tore the side of our car out and my arm went with it,” he recalls.
“Dad drove me straight to a hospital in Kalgoorlie. I had about nine broken bones and my right arm was a mess. I remember being sedated and sitting in a wheelchair when the doctor pointed to the top of my arm and said to his colleague: ‘We are going to take his arm off from here.”
But his father was having none of it. He firmly insisted upon flying his son to Perth the next morning for a second opinion. Nine operations later, Manners junior’s arm remarkably remained intact. But it would be locked at the elbow in perpetuity.
A budding musician in his youth, he had loved playing the piano and the old clarinet he pinched from his grandfather’s coffin before his burial.
Sadly he never played the former again. But after the accident his father ensured the latter passion could continue when he paid 40 pounds to the local music shop in Kalgoorlie to design a special clarinet so his son’s fingers could still reach the keys.
“I played every Wednesday night in a jazz ensemble for 20 years, until the gold boom happened. Every couple of years something goes wrong with my arm and I’ve got to get it fixed. But every time I do my shoelaces up – you need two hands for that – I whisper to myself quietly, ‘Thanks Dad’,” Manners says with a wide smile.
“I also think because of that experience I now question everything. Things are never quite what they look.”
This year his Mannwest Group celebrates its 128th anniversary. Its predecessor, WG Manners & Co, was established in 1895 when his grandfather WG Manners – the son of a Ballarat prospector – set up a mining engineering business to design and build mining plants in Kalgoorlie.
Born with mining in his blood, Manners junior started out as an electrical engineer training at the Kalgoorlie School of Mines, and took over the family business from his father in 1955.
Now known as a legend of the local industry – he is emeritus chairman of the Australian Mining Hall of Fame – over the decades he floated a number of Australian-listed nickel, iron ore and gold mining companies.
But his greatest claim to fame was starting and building Croesus Mining, the firm named after the ancient King of Lydia (now western Turkey) noted for his great wealth and the fact he was the first ruler ever to mint gold coins.
At one point Croesus was Australia’s third-largest gold producer and during Manners’ two decades as chair it established 26 mines and produced 1.275 million ounces of gold.
Sadly in 2006 Croesus slipped into the hands of administrators due to disappearing orebodies and a nasty hedge book, nine months after Manners’ retirement. Famed WA prospector Mark Creasy was then its largest individual shareholder.
Manners says Mannwest Group has always been an enthusiastic participant in the introduction of new technologies during the booms and busts of commodity prices.
He proudly describes mining as “the greatest creative industry in the world”,
But in an era of massive global corporations and an Australian resource sector increasingly foreign owned, the now 87 year old says the industry will never return to its halcyon days.
“Back then we were doing stuff for the first time so we would help each other. There was a free exchange of information because we were all trying to do things better. It was an amazing spirit of camaraderie,” he laments. “That was an era that probably won’t come back because everything is now corporatised. The average CEO wouldn’t dare do that today.”
Manners describes his late father – known as C.B Manners – as a great role model. They were very close.
After the credit squeeze induced by the Menzies government in the early 1960s, he and his father started a farming operation at Esperance before the latter suffered a fatal heart attack while chasing cattle on the property in 1966. He was only 72.
“I was in Kalgoorlie that day running the family business and I still believe that if I was there helping dad on the farm, I might have saved him,” he says solemnly.
“That would have been important because he would have seen the nickel boom. My grandfather ran the family business for 30 years and enjoyed the gold boom at the turn of the century. Dad ran it for 30 years when there was zero happening. In the month dad died they declared Kambalda as a commercial mining project and bang, off it went.”
Manners’ mother was 10 years younger than her husband and started life as a school teacher.
But being in a mining town, she decided to visit the Kalgoorlie School of Mines to enrol in studying geology. There she was told the language in the classroom would be too strong for a woman.
“So she told them ‘What if I don’t listen!’,” her son recalls with a proud smile.
“She never worked as a geologist but got the qualification. When I did geology many years later I used her notes, they were so detailed. They were really helpful.”
The inspiration of his mother led to Manners becoming an industry pioneer in employing female geologists. “They asked questions, they were unrelenting in showing up their male colleagues, and they lifted the whole industry as a result,” he declares.
Manners’ exploration work during his career was also assisted by his chance involvement at just 15 years of age in the now infamous outback crash of a Vickers Viscount aircraft owned by McRoberts Miller Airlines – the predecessor of Ansett WA – on New Year’s Eve 1968.
There were no survivors when the plane plummeted into the scrub of Indee Station, 70km south of Port Hedland.
”We were out in the bush one afternoon and heard this almighty thump in the distance. When we got to the site, bodies were everywhere and there was vertebrae all over the place. I remember putting a few in my pocket as evidence of what I had seen, just because I thought the kids at school would never believe me,” he recalls.
“I also managed to knock off the set of pilot maps that were printed on pieces of fabric. I then used those very detailed aeronautical maps throughout my exploration days. They had details that other maps didn’t.”
In 2018, after a ceremony he attended marking the 50th anniversary of the crash, he was contacted by the daughter of the pilot.
“She came to my office in west Perth and I presented her with the maps because I wasn’t exploring anymore,” he says.
While he now lives in Perth, Manners says he was lucky to grow up and live in the “exciting” community that was Kalgoorlie during the second half of the 20th century.
Gold will always be his favourite metal. Last year he used a 1kg gold bar he’d hoarded for four decades to pay for a fancy new Lexus.
“I’ve always had a fascination for gold. It is still the only mineral you can follow on from the discovery process of prospecting and exploration, to finding a mine, opening a pit, building a mill, processing the gold and pouring gold bars. You are in charge of all the processes and you can then market the gold yourself. There’s no other mineral like it,” he says.
“There is also something when you pour your first bar. Women talk about the feeling when they hold their child for the first time. But that is nothing compared to holding your first bar!”
His name was Arvi Parbo, a former chairman of Western Mining Corp, BHP, Alcoa and at one point arguably the most powerful corporate executive in the country.
To this day Manners believes Parbo stands above the rest as the person he has most admired over the decades in the resource sector, despite him hailing from Estonia.
He first met Parbo when he was 17 and they stayed in touch for decades afterwards.
“His first job was at Bullfinch near Southern Cross, out in the middle of nowhere. He was made the underground mine manger there because they couldn’t find staff. We met up when I went there to give him some advice about new miners cap lamps that were better than the ones they were using,” Manners says.
“He had a very heavy European accent and I remember driving back to Kalgoorlie in my Holden ute thinking ‘The poor bugger will never make it because nobody will be able to understand him!’ Yet he went on to become, without doubt, the most significant figure in corporate Australia in the second half of last century.”
Manners also developed a friendship with WA mining magnate Lang Hancock, which now endures with the latter’s famous daughter Gina Rinehart.
“I was one of the few people that argued with Lang. He wanted someone to bounce ideas off and he had a habit of getting information from the source. He wouldn’t accept anything second hand,” he says.
“I think Lang’s style is something Gina has inherited. If she wants information about something, she goes straight to the source. So people in authority can expect to get a call from her.”
Rinehart still has a celebration each year to mark her late father’s birthday. Manners is always on the guest list.
“Despite her wealth, she hasn’t changed at all. It is amazing. I think she’s handling it well. There is a total responsibility to be in that position. Half the world is hoping you trip over.”
As a proponent of the free market economic model, Manners set up the Mannkal Economic Education Foundation in 1997, a think-tank that has sponsored over 2500 students to study in Australia and overseas. It is now his passion.
He says Mannkal has given Mannwest a new-found purpose: to rebel against bad economics and bad education, however well-meaning, popular and respected.
As one of the elder statesmen of Australia’s liberty movement and the author of five books, he still believes that individualism and personal responsibility are powerful drivers of change.
He has also long admired people displaying “heroic humility”.
“The phrase best describes many of my role models and I admire this ‘style’ as it helps avoid the trap of ‘self-burial’,” he says.
From the age of just 16, one of his greatest mentors was famed American economist Leonard E Read, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education – the first modern libertarian think tank in the US.
Manners is now on the board of the Mont Pelerin Society that Read started with another top US economist Milton Friedman. A photo of Read hangs proudly on the wall of Mannkal’s Perth office.
“He used to offer these little one-liners in letters he would write to me,” he says. “He once told me the best thing you can do is bring an idea to the threshold of someone’s consciousness, and then back off. If that idea stays in their mind, it will be theirs for life. You will never persuade anyone by belting them over the head.”
As he prepares to turn 88 in January, Manners continues to turn up to the Mannkal office most days. With his right elbow still locked. He wouldn’t dream of doing anything else.
“I learn so much from the young people in the office because they have a different way of learning, a different attention span. My generation procrastinate, we are always looking for more information. The youngsters don’t want that. They just want a quick grab so they can go and make their own mistakes. I love it!” he says.
“The mates that I’ve spent a lot of time with over the years often say to me, ‘Why can’t you just be normal like the rest of us and play golf or buy a yacht.’ I tell them, ‘Mannkal is my yacht.’ I have more fun everyday than any of them that have yachts.”