How mining legend Ron Manners defied death and experts to build an empire

Lost in a remote corner of the Pilbara, gold miner Ron Manners desperately radioed for help. There was only one man in Western Australia who knew where he was.

Ron Manners underground at the Golden Rainbow Mine in 1984.

It happened one evening on a desolate stretch of highway, as darkness cloaked the vast outback plains of Western Australia. Ron Manners was just 17 and at the wheel of his parents’ car as they travelled between Kalgoorlie and Esperance. In the distance, the headlights of an oncoming truck blinked into view.

The headlights slowly grew brighter as the truck drew near. And as it passed, without warning, a massive piece of machinery carelessly hanging from the truck’s rear sliced through the side of the family’s car.

It took half of Ron’s right arm with it.

By the time his father got him to the hospital in Kalgoorlie, the limb was dangling from a ­tangle of tendons. Nine bones were shattered. Barely conscious, Ron recalls waking in the hospital to hear raised voices. His father, Charles, was locked in a tense exchange with local doctor Alan Webster.

“Charlie,” the doctor whispered, hoping Ron could not hear, “I’m going to cut Ron’s arm off just here.” He marked the limb with something akin to a Sharpie pen, as if it were a butcher’s diagram. “It’s too far gone. We’ll never save it.”

But “Chas” Manners, as Ron nicknamed his father, was not the kind of man to roll over for an expert opinion. “Alan,” he said, “you may be a good friend, and that may be good advice, but we are taking Ron to Perth tomorrow.”

It took nine surgeries, but Ron kept his arm. It would never move freely again, frozen forever at the elbow, but it stayed with him.

In many ways, this monumental episode, which occurred in the twilight of his teenage years, has become the story of Ron Manners’ long and successful life: Listen to the experts, then prove them wrong.

Ron Manners was born on January 8, 1936, in what passed for a hospital in those days in Kalgoorlie: a modest house with a few extra beds. He was born with mining in his blood, as the son and grandson of gold prospectors/­producers and mining ­engineers.

After taking over the family business from his ­father in 1955 Ron modernised it, expanded it, and later changed its name to Mannwest Group. He floated a string of successful nickel, gold and iron ore ventures, but his crowning achievement came with Croesus Mining.

It was a company he named after the ancient King of Lydia (in what is now Turkey), the first ruler in history to mint gold coins. It also happened to be the name of the street in Kalgoorlie where he spent much of his childhood and many of his subsequent years.

At its peak, Croesus was Australia’s third largest locally-controlled gold producer. Under Manners’ two-decade stewardship, it produced 1.275 million ounces of gold, launched 26 mines, and paid 11 dividends to shareholders.

A young Ron Manners (front left) standing in front of his grandfather Pom Pom Stevens, with his mum Nancy, grandmother and younger sister Frances.

Ron Manners at Binduli open cut gold mine in Kalgoorlie in 1997.

But the gold eventually ran out. In 2006, nine months after Manners retired from the company, Croesus collapsed under the weight of disappearing ore bodies and an ill-timed hedge book. Still, he never wavered in his love of gold. He fondly remembers the moment he poured his first gold bar, with its feeling of weight, heat and promise. “That feeling has stayed with me my whole life,” he says.

Manners became emeritus chairman of the Australian Prospectors & Miners’ Hall of Fame and is now regarded as a legend of Australian mining, while the Mannwest Group marked its 130th anniversary in 2024, a rare milestone in an ­industry known for its booms and busts.

As a proponent of free market economics, Manners is also responsible for setting up the Mannkal Economic Education Foundation in 1997, a think-tank that has sponsored more than 2500 students to study here and overseas. It is now his passion as well as his purpose. He says Mannkal allows him a base from which to rebel against bad economics and bad education, however well-meaning, popular and respected.

In its own humble way, Mannwest has always embraced new technologies and backed contrarian ideas. But its core philosophy hasn’t changed: independence, creativity and an ­unwillingness to accept “no” for an answer. Just like Manners’ father on that fateful night in a ­Kalgoorlie hospital many decades ago.

“I learned early that experts can give you good advice,” Manners says. “But sometimes, you’ve just got to ignore it and make up your own mind. That is how we survived. That is how we built our company.”

To this day, whenever he ties his shoelaces, he quietly mouths a few words: “This would not be much fun with one hand. Thanks, Dad.”

Another influential­figure in his life was Lang Hancock. In the 1960s, Hancock was not an ­ordinary man, even by Western Australia’s ­rugged standards. He was a prospector, pilot, maverick and millionaire-in-the-making.

By 1963, Manners knew of the legend of Hancock but had never met the great man. Still, in that year, Hancock’s intimate knowledge of the Pilbara would save his life.

Manners and two close mates – resourceful, restless and undeterred by the tyranny of ­distance – had decided to travel north in search of new buyers for their mining equipment. Their plan was simple: fly to Thaduna, a remote copper mine 180km northeast of Meekatharra, make some sales, then detour to Wittenoom to inspect the infamous asbestos mine.

The idea, like so many conceived in Kalgoorlie’s back rooms and pubs, was a cross between a business trip and an expedition.

Realising the distance was too great to cover by road in a couple of days, they hired a small aircraft. The plane’s owner, peering at the trio like a sceptical barman surveying first-time drinkers, had asked pointedly, “Do any of you know what you’re doing?”

Only one of the three held a pilot’s licence. Manners, typically undaunted, reassured the man: “That’s OK, he can fly the thing, and I’ve just bought a new map, so we’ll be fine.”

They weren’t fine.

The flight to Thaduna went smoothly enough. The mine, operated by Rodney ­Fletcher and Malcolm Scott, was a patch of true pioneering grit where copper was both mined and concentrated on-site, then shipped to Japan in recycled 44-gallon drums. It was the kind of bootstrapped industry that captured Manners’ imagination.

But it was the return leg that would rewrite the script of the adventure. “We asked them how to get to Wittenoom from there,” Manners recounts. “Rod looked at us and said, ‘Just head west, look for Mt Bruce. It’s the highest mountain in the state. When you get [in the vicinity], fly in ever-increasing circles. You can’t miss it.’”

They could miss it, and they did.

Hours into their westward journey, two mountains appeared on the horizon. Manners and his mates at first believed one of them was Mt Bruce, but they turned out to be mistaken.

They circled endlessly, the aircraft tracing huge circles in the Pilbara sky. Below them was nothing but the jagged, desolate ranges of a red continent that had defied navigation for centuries. In the cockpit, the fuel gauge inched towards empty, and then the engine suddenly coughed and spluttered. They calmly activated their radio and ­contacted the Department of Civil Aviation, as it was known back then. The air traffic ­controller’s advice was blunt: “Try to set down somewhere, and as you do, remember any ­landmarks.”

By a stroke of amazing good luck they ­spotted what looked like an old airstrip, partly reclaimed by the scrub. It was overgrown, ­dotted with trees and scarred with old wheel ruts. Still, it was better than nothing.

They landed hard, but stayed intact. Dust and spinifex swept across the makeshift airstrip when they tumbled out of the plane. Night was fast falling. “There’s only one person in Western Australia who might know where you are,” the air traffic controller told them over the radio. “We’re going to ring him.”

‘I don’t know how you got down there’: Lang Hancock.

That person was Lang Hancock. He was the only man alive who might recognise a disused landing strip in the heart of the Hamersley Ranges based on a vague description and the presence of a creek at one corner.

The Department of Civil Aviation called Hancock’s home, only to be told Lang and his then-wife Hope were at the movies. “We’ll try again at 11,” they told the stranded men.

When 11pm arrived, Hancock answered the call and paused only briefly before responding. “I don’t know how you got down there,” he said, “but that’s my old strip. Haven’t used it for years.” He advised them to clear the trees if they hoped to take off again.

Hancock’s knowledge was precise and ­uncanny. He had used that airstrip decades ­earlier in his own explorations of the Pilbara. It was a corner of the map that only he, perhaps, still ­remembered in detail.

Manners recalls sitting by the campfire that night when one of his mates commented, “Isn’t it remarkable that in a state this size, there’s only one person who could find us?”

Seven years passed before Manners had ­contact with Hancock again. Manners was ­raising capital for small mining companies known as “penny dreadfuls” at the time, and travelling extensively.

The nickel boom was raging. Whenever he mentioned in overseas meetings that he was from Western Australia, people would always ask the same thing: “You must know Lang ­Hancock?” In 1970, tired of the embarrassment of having to say no, he called Hancock directly. It was a cold call with an awkward pretext.

“I think we may have some things in common,” he said to the older man sheepishly.

Hancock was curt in response. “I’ll give you ten minutes. I’ll see you at ten o’clock ­tomorrow morning at my office. Don’t be late.”

Manners flew to Perth for the meeting. Ten minutes turned into five hours.

They discovered a shared admiration for classical economists: Milton Friedman for ­Hancock, F.A. Hayek for Manners. Hancock summoned his secretary to photocopy pages from books, journals and letters to give to his visitor. Manners left his office that day ­carrying a box brimming with papers – what he would later call “a photocopied library of magnificent stuff.”

That day, a friendship was born.

It was not long after their first proper meeting that Hancock began to cure Manners of his ignorance of the Pilbara. The younger man knew mining, gold and investment markets but nothing of the ancient escarpments of the Hamersley Range. Hancock set about changing that, and over the next few years he flew Manners across the Pilbara on several personally guided tours, sometimes up to five days in duration. They were ­private ­expeditions that felt more like mentorships than sightseeing trips.

‘Every time I use that word “persistence”, I think of Lang Hancock,’ says Manners.

Hancock had a flair for low-flying, swooping down over ridges and ­valleys to point out some ancient geological fold or a promising iron ore formation. Sometimes, while exploring on foot, he ­simply wanted to show Manners a bird’s nest hidden in a cave, or ochre handprints on a rock wall – remnants of a ­civilisation that had thrived in the Pilbara long before the first ­mining licence was granted.

These were the moments that stayed with Manners the most. He says Hancock was thought of publicly as a bullish entrepreneur, but up there in the Hamersley Ranges, surrounded by silence and stone, he was a conservationist. He would often speak of native flora and fauna, the threats posed by unchecked tourism, and the need for discreet stewardship.

It was a side of Hancock that never made the headlines. The man who once proposed using nuclear devices to fracture ore bodies was also a man who would stop a 4WD in its tracks to marvel at a honeyeater’s nest.

Manners was one of the few people who challenged Hancock intellectually. And one of the even fewer Hancock welcomed a challenge from. “If I was wrong, he wanted to know. If he was wrong, he wanted to know that too,” ­Manners says. “He didn’t want anything ­second-hand. He didn’t want hearsay. He wanted the source.”

Hancock had a habit that set him apart in business and politics: he travelled to get the truth. If he wanted to understand economics, he flew to the US to sit with Milton Friedman. If he wanted clarity on nuclear technology, he brought Edward Teller – the father of the ­hydrogen bomb – to Perth for private discussions. If he wanted to know about environmental ­impacts, he didn’t read departmental reports. Rather, he tracked down dissident physicists like Dr Petr Beckmann and asked questions himself.

Hancock’s influence ran deeper than iron ore discoveries or geological foresight. He was one of the first figures in Australian business to embody what Manners came to call “Growth through persistence”, the motto of his own company, Mannwest.

Ron Manners (third from left) with a young Gina Rinehart in the Pilbara.

‘(Gina and I) have never had a fight,’ says Manners.

“Every time I use that word ‘persistence’, I think of Lang Hancock. Persistence is an inspirational word that can bring success to everyone at any stage of their personal development, in every walk of life,” Manners says.

The pair never did business together – ­Manners stayed focused on gold and Hancock on iron ore – but they shared a common ethos of risk-taking, self-reliance, and a disregard for bureaucracy when the facts were clearer than the red tape. Hancock, in particular, loathed ­process for its own sake.

“He didn’t see why he should await the pleasure of bureaucrats when he knew the ­information he had already assembled was, in most cases, superior to the information the bureaucracy was getting. It annoyed him that he had to stand in line, waiting for these people to go through their endless processes,” Manners says. “He clearly understood the principles of capital and labour, the resultant wealth ­creation that can come from fusing them together – and how, without getting that right first, all the ‘redistributionists’ of the world are simply pissing into the wind.”

Independence would make Hancock atarget, but also a role model. “He could be himself, whereas most of us couldn’t be. Whether you’re from Rio Tinto, the Labor Party or the Liberal Party, you can’t be yourself. You have to toe the line. I think Lang’s individualism used to drive them nuts with absolute, sheer envy. They didn’t envy Lang for his money, which only came later in his life; they envied him for his free spirit. He could be himself and they couldn’t,” Manners says.

Gina Rinehart was an omnipresent figure in her father’s world from a young age. Manners remembers her as a 16-year-old shadowing Hancock through the Pilbara, absorbing every conversation, every instruction. He was invited to her 21st birthday, and continued to be a part of the family’s orbit long after Hancock died. He has since remained close to Rinehart.

“We’ve never had a fight, and we are always very open with each other,” Manners says. She has inherited her father’s style, he says, ­especially his impatience for bureaucracy and love of first-hand information.

What might have happened if he had not met Hancock? Or if Hancock had not answered the call that night in 1963 when his small plane made an emergency landing in the desert? Manners shudders to think. He has always believed that Hancock’s legacy should not be measured in iron ore or political speeches, but rather etched into the decisions made by the next generation, into the persistence shown by those who followed, and the independence of thought they tried to preserve.

Damon Kitney’s biography of Ron Manners, Heroic Humility ($34.99, Wilkinson Publishing), is out now