CHAPTER 1
There is an elemental rawness to the town. The light is so harsh that shadows seem etched on the footpaths. The flies persist as of right. The locals measure their greetings; they know only two locations – Broken Hill and ‘away’ – and puzzled visitors often think they hear ‘Hawaii’.
Though some mining continues at its extremities, the main ore body is long gone, consumed in the insatiable maw of industry. Yet its doppelganger remains, a dark presence slightly taller and much smoother than the original, dividing the town and looming over it. Made from a massive pile of tailings and fill that has been shaped to follow the old line of lode, it supports a lookout, a restaurant and a memorial to the 820 miners who have lost their lives – often in the most gruesome ways – in the quest to extract the riches from the ore body’s ancient veins. ‘Lead poisoning’ dominates the early tragedies, but ‘rockfall’ also rates highly, as does ‘crushed by machinery’, ‘fell down shaft’, ‘left cage prematurely’, ‘cut lip (septicaemia)’, and the memorably Gothic ‘entombed’.
Down on the flat, the centre of the commercial area is Argent Street and comprises strips of standardised American fast-food outlets, Australian country cafes, real-estate agencies and hotels, interspersed with anachronistic furniture and clothing shops. But the real character of the place is best observed in the houses that jostle up to its edges. Most are made from galvanised iron, as temporary and insubstantial as the Wilyakali’s gunyas.
The houses have an unexpected and utterly incongruous twist. Some time in the 1950s during a wave of prosperity, a householder – no one remembers who – added a new feature to his iron box to give it a sense of bourgeois respectability and permanence: a stand-alone concrete facade boasting two Corinthian columns. The neighbours were instantly envious. Suddenly, it was a ‘must have’ for everyone on the block; and within six months the contagion had spread to every corner of the town. Some columns were fluted, others twisted like a pair of snakes mating; some were smooth, others patterned; some bulged in the middle, others rose straight and true to an Ionic or Doric capital just beneath the galvanised iron eaves. The newly house-proud miners and their wives painted them white or primrose or garish green. They planted flower beds at their base and watered them at dawn or in the dusty evenings as the Sun slipped beneath the horizon.
Sadly, the effect 50 years later is precisely the opposite from that intended. The growing gaps between the concrete facades and the iron boxes give the impression of ill-fitting wigs on old bald pates. Most of the flower gardens have long since shrivelled in the baking heat and the houses squat around the line of lode like small, resentful strangers, shimmering in the haze. They are a poignant illustration of the fleeting relationship between the human species and the great elemental forces: when one of our number discovers a prize, we gather in frenzy to harvest the riches; and when the most desirable bits are consumed, our interest fades ... until the next time.
After a long decline, Broken Hill has been partially resuscitated by the mining boom that coincided with the industrialisation of China and India. But the day is fast coming when the mineral veins are all consumed and the last remaining evidence of human habitation has weathered away, the detritus buried – entombed – beneath the red sand blowing in from the west.
Standing atop the doppelganger, it takes no effort of the imagination to sweep away the hastily assembled impedimenta of the town and recreate the place in the mind’s eye as a party of European explorers passes by the base of a jagged hill set in the endless flatlands of the outback. It is April 1844, and Charles Sturt, repatriated from command of the hellhole of Norfolk Island, leads his 15 men, 200 sheep, 30 bullocks, six dogs, six drays and a boat in his obsessive quest for the fabled inland sea. Just beyond the hog-backed hill, they are forced to camp by a sluggish stream for months before the rains arrive to replenish the inland watercourses and permit further venture into the unknown.
Among the party are John McDouall Stuart, who will later become the first European to prevail over the parched interior and reach the northern coastline; James Poole, the second in command whose namesake will help set the BHP saga in motion; and, even more remarkably, James Lewis, whose grandson will almost single-handedly turn the company into the biggest in the land. But it is Poole who deals Sturt’s expedition the fatal blow when he returns from a scouting expedition in October to report the great discovery: the mighty inland sea glittering in the middle distance.
A joyous, triumphant Sturt sends the news back to Adelaide that soon they will broach ‘these strange waters on which boat never swam, over which flag never floated. But both shall ere long.’
Alas, the mirage shimmers in tantalising retreat. An anguished Sturt will soon be blind and Poole dead of exhaustion, scurvy and misery. And for the next 16 years, only the Aboriginal people pass by on their seasonal safari.
In 1860 come Burke and Wills, a massive expedition even more elaborately equipped than Sturt’s, yet still no match for the unrelenting wilderness. Then, from our perch 40 metres above the plain, new arrivals with sheep and horses may be seen making their way towards uncertain bends in watercourses, where they settle and build their rough shelters and solid homesteads on holdings half the size of Wales. Their ambitions too have the quality of mirages, and many depart defeated.
Mount Gipps station, which incorporates the broken hill at the southern extremity of the Barrier Ranges, passes from one owner to another until in 1875 George McCulloch, a broad, tough Scot, is appointed by his uncle and part-owner, the then Victorian premier, Sir James McCulloch, to run the 3626-square-kilometre property.
He is a good man for the job, well educated in Edinburgh and with practical farming experience in South America. He runs a tight ship, and the huge run with its 71,000 sheep begins to make a profit.
McCulloch has been granted a one-eighth share in the property and employs mostly single men, although his gardener, James ‘Frans’ Maygar, is married to Mary, née Smith, the daughter of English immigrants, who acts as the housekeeper. She not only cooks for the men, she salts the mutton, washes the clothes and fights an unending battle against the red dust that billows in from the north and west. Aside from the Aboriginal women who camp nearby, her only female companion is Meg, wife of the bookkeeper, George Lind. In the vastness of the outback, the small Mount Gipps community forms a tight bond.
McCulloch cares little for the rumours that gold has been discovered in other parts of the Barrier Ranges, and when the first strikes of silver are made at nearby Umberumberka (soon to be renamed Silverton), he refuses to permit prospectors on Mount Gipps, as they kill his sheep for tucker. And he threatens his men with the sack if they waste their time in prospecting instead of tending the stock and the boundary fences.
Silverton thrives. In the early 1880s, tents spring up among the bluebush. Ramshackle pubs open for business and never shut their doors. Bullock teams bring lumber and hard liquor. McGowan’s Royal Coaches vie with their scarlet Cobb & Co rivals to ferry in the hopefuls. Solitary prospectors half-mad from the flies stagger across the baking plains, their boots collapsing, baring their feet to the fiery red sand. Nearby settlements such as Thackaringa have also struck paydirt. Barroom tales of the Victorian gold rush of the 1850s find new currency. Excitement shimmers in the harsh sunlight; hope turns to greed, dreams to wild obsession.
On 3 September 1883, a lone rider approaches the broken hill. Lean and sunburned, with a yellow beard, his hair worn thin beneath a battered felt hat, blue shirt open at the neck, muscular arms, moleskins belted around the waist and stuck into his riding boots, he dismounts at an outcrop of black rock. He is watchful, purposeful. He pulls out his Goyder’s Mining Guide picked up in Adelaide on his last visit there and checks the rock against the pictures. He takes the hammer from his belt, breaks off some samples and weighs them in his roughened hands. Just as he thought, they are much heavier than the mullock that others have taken them for. He allows himself a moment of satisfaction, then packs them into a bag he has brought for the purpose. He remounts and turns his horse towards his two mates, the dam-sinker David James and his offsider, James Poole, who are working across the paddock.
As he guides his stock horse through that vast, silent landscape, it is certain that he shares that hum of excitement that has swept across the land, certain too that he carries a vision of what might flow from the discovery of the tin oxide that he believes is safely tucked away in his hessian sack. But whatever the outlines of that vision, whatever its depth or dimension, he could not know. No one could...
For more than a century, the rider’s identity has been accepted as Charles Rasp, an edible-oil technologist from Germany who had arrived in Australia in 1869 aged 23. The principal source has been Archie Watson, who met him on arrival. Then a knockabout 20-year-old on his grandfather’s property on the Upper Murray, Archie later became the first Elder professor of anatomy at Adelaide University. Celebrated as a genius by many – and derided as a crackpot by others – he would flee a piracy charge from his time on a Queensland kanaka boat 1 and haul up in Europe, where he studied medicine in Göttingen, Paris and London, including surgery under the great Joseph Lister. He and Rasp became instant mates and in later life were close companions until Rasp’s death. Watson believed that Rasp was born on 7 October 1846 in north Germany. His parents were both dead by the time he was 12 and he lived for a time in Paris with an aunt. He was well educated and later trained in a big chemical company headquartered in Hamburg. Because he was fluent in English and French, he made his mark in the company’s international marketing arm. But because of a persistent lung complaint, he set out for southern climes and after his arrival in Australia worked for the next 13 years on properties around the Murray-Darling.
He is said to have passed through Mount Gipps while droving sheep and to have been attracted by the broken hill, the black outcropping reminding him of tin mines in his native Saxony. And when he approached the manager, George McCulloch, for a job on the place, the rough-hewn 34-year-old Scotsman offered him £1 a week and his tucker. Rasp accepted.
More recently, however, Maja Sainisch-Plimer, whose geologist husband, Ian Plimer, is a leading authority on the Broken Hill deposit, has mined the past and uncovered a new vein. According to her research, ‘Charles Rasp’ was in fact the nom de guerre of a German Army deserter.
Indeed, the Sainisch-Plimer scenario is worthy of Charles Dickens, whose son, E. B. L. Dickens, was running a stock and station agency at Silverton at the time. Rasp, she says, was in fact Jerome Salvator Lopez von Pereira, the grandson of a Portuguese diplomat and his Saxon wife. After his return from France, Jerome enlisted in the Royal Saxon Army in 1865 aged 18. Then, in the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, he was overwhelmed by the desperate conditions in the German lines and when his close friend, Dr Emanuel Raspe, was killed in action on 2 December young Jerome deserted his army post, made his way to Holland and bought passage to Australia under the name of van Hengel. Once ashore in Melbourne, according to Sainisch-Plimer, he adopted the surname of his dead friend, grew a beard and passed himself off as ‘Charles Rasp’.
If true, he would not have been the only European arrival to have started his life in the antipodes with a brand new identity. The gold discoveries had thrown Australian colonial administration into chaos. In the 1850s in Victoria alone, the population jumped from 77,000 to 540,000 in just two years. Indeed, the number of new arrivals exceeded the number of convicts who had been transported from the United Kingdom in the previous 70 years. When Charles Rasp stepped ashore in 1869 (in accordance with Archie Watson’s account, but not Sainisch-Plimer’s), the country’s population had trebled from 430,000 in 1851 to 1.7 million; there was no time, no manpower and no inclination to check the bona fides of each member of the human tide sweeping ashore.
It is common ground among researchers that Rasp spent his first few years in Australia picking grapes at Lilydale, gold-mining in northern Victoria, working as a station hand on the Victoria–New South Wales border and tin-mining at Jingellic, a small settlement on the upper Murray River. In the early 1880s, he continued further north into New South Wales, working on various sheep stations and loading river boats on the Darling. He eventually pitched up at Mount Gipps sheep station in the Barrier Ranges and had his historic meeting with both George McCulloch and that blackened stump of a hill, shunned by silver prospectors as a heap of mullock.
By then, there was another factor at play in Rasp’s quest, beyond the usual ambition among prospectors for untold riches. If, as he fervently hoped, he had discovered a lode of tin oxide, it would provide the shining key to unlock the heart of 25-year-old Agnes Klevesahl, the twinkling, buxom waitress in Café Kindermann, his favourite Adelaide coffee house.
Café Kindermann, with its marble-topped tables, newspapers and dominoes, was something of an institution in Rundle Street. Agnes and her shy little sister had been specially sponsored by Frau Kindermann from her home village in Germany to help in the business. A regular group of professional men gathered there, and though Rasp camped on the banks of the Torrens in the early days he was welcomed into their company. He reciprocated warmly, but in truth it was Agnes who drew him back to that sensual snuggery with its delicious aromas, sparkling surfaces and genial conversation. And while she was welcoming, even encouraging, she left him in no doubt: she would never give her hand to a penniless boundary rider of the wasteland.
So when he arrived at the dam-sinkers’ camp with his ‘tin’ samples, he was not just arguing for a mining partnership but for his heart and soul. Nothing would divert him from his course. Fortunately, both men came from mining communities. David James was born in Wales in 1854 and had worked in the coal mines as a youth, arriving in South Australia with his mother and other members of the family in February 1877. They settled at Kapunda, and David became a contractor, building fences, sinking wells and excavating dams all over the state. James Poole had been born in a Cornish tin-mining region in 1848; he was a follower and would fall in behind his cobber.
Rasp later admitted, ‘I had no idea of minerals. I was as green as could be.’ 2 But such was the certainty in his demeanour that by lunchtime that day he had persuaded them to join him in pegging the hill so they could register their claim (which would be known as Block 10). That done, he set off for the little stone cottage on a distant Silverton hillside where he lodged the application with Constable Richard Connell, who doubled as deputy mining registrar.
But that was only half the battle. Now he had to confront George McCulloch. And that probably meant he’d be out of a job. Well, so be it.
On 5 September, after a billy of tea at the tumbledown shack of galvanised iron and wattle sticks that he called home, Rasp made his way to the manager’s residence. He found McCulloch on the verandah of the big, stone, eight-roomed homestead known as Government House enjoying an evening smoke. The Scot had a soft spot for the quietly spoken German, whom he called ‘the walking encyclopedia’. But when Rasp announced he was giving up his job and wanted to draw his pay, McCulloch rounded on him. ‘Ye’ve been pegging the hill!’
Rasp admitted it and gave his reasons. In the telling, that sense of certainty that had gripped him in his talk with the dam-sinkers returned, and in the hour that followed, brought about a conversion in McCulloch worthy of St Paul himself. By the end of the evening, it was the Scot who was making plans to develop the claim. He roused the other members of the Mount Gipps team from their billets, and by midnight they had shaken hands on a deal. They were the syndicate of seven.
It was an unlikely combination. Philip Charley, the station’s 20-year-old jackaroo, had been born at Ballarat on 2 September 1863. Orphaned at 12, he became a clerk in the Melbourne law office of Malleson, England and Stewart, but indoor work and the Melbourne climate undermined his constitution and his doctor advised him to depart for the dry interior. His employer and patron, J. C. Stewart, arranged with Sir James McCulloch for young Charley to work as a station hand at Mount Gipps, and within a couple of years the scorching winds of the West Darling district had cleared up his respiratory complaint; he had grown into a slim, sturdy, energetic young man, full of cheer and pleasantries.
George Urquhart, the sheep overseer, born in Inverness, Scotland, in 1845, arrived in Australia as an infant and grew up in Melbourne. As a young man, he was employed by his uncle, also named George Urquhart, who then owned, or managed, Kinchega station in northern Victoria.
They joined with Charles Rasp, George McCulloch, George Lind, David James and James Poole on that fateful night, each promising to contribute £70 from his pay or savings to meet the working expenses of their ‘tin mine’. Over the next two weeks, they pegged out blocks 11 to 16, stretching across six kilometres of the area surrounding the hill. Each owned an equal share but, because of his position on the property, George McCulloch took a leading role. However, the driving force behind the enterprise in the early months was undoubtedly Charles Rasp. It was Rasp who took the rock samples to Adelaide to have them assayed. He told his partners he didn’t trust the assayers at Silverton, but the real reason was his desire to see Agnes.
His plans – both mining and marital – suffered a serious blow when the initial assays revealed no tin but small amounts of lead and silver. Rasp said later, ‘For 12 months it was really doubtful whether we could make anything of it.’ 3 On the property, all hands were fighting the ravages of drought and, as if that were not enough, rabbits had reached plague proportions in the lush Victorian countryside and surged north and west into the Darling and the Barrier Ranges. As the dams turned to baked mud and the scant vegetation dried to a crisp, the rotting sheep carcasses and poisoned rabbits attracted clouds of flies, which tormented man and beast alike.
To finance more work on the claim, the seven partners agreed to split their shares in half and to sell one of their resulting fourteenth shares, provided they offered it to other syndicate members first. The result was a lottery of transactions in which ‘cattle king’ Sidney Kidman passed up a fortune when he bought half of James Poole’s holding for six bullocks but then cashed it in for a few pounds; Poole later sold his other fourteenth share for £4500 and counted himself a winner.
David James disposed of a one-fourteenth share to a government surveyor, William Jamieson, for £110. Jamieson, who had come west to survey mining leases and settlements, would become a very active member of the syndicate. Later, the Welsh dam-sinker sold a further one-twenty-eighth share for £1800 to Harvey Patterson, owner of nearby Corona station.
Urquhart sold his whole one-seventh interest in the syndicate for £910 to Sam Hawkins, the Mount Gipps carpenter, and departed for Melbourne.
George McCulloch offered the new assistant bookkeeper, a young Englishman named Alfred Cox, a fourteenth share for £200, and when Cox haggled, he agreed to play three games of euchre against the 21-year-old to decide the price. Cox won, paid only £120 and left soon afterwards. That one share would make him a millionaire.
McCulloch then leaned on Lind to sell him one of his one-fourteenth shares for £90 to make up his ‘loss’. In the event, Lind sold a fourteenth to McCulloch and a fourteenth to Rasp early in 1884 and left for Melbourne to join the staff of a bank. Charles Rasp and George McCulloch would end up holding three-fourteenths each.
The Linds’ departure was a blow to Mary Smith Maygar the housekeeper, as it left her the only white woman on the property. And it is notable that her husband, Frans, was not included in the syndicate of seven. Indeed, a sense of mystery still surrounds Frans’s fate. According to Broken Hill historian Jenny Camilleri, Maygar became ‘discontented’ with his life on the property and ‘one day [in 1884] he rode away on his horse never to return’. 4 Soon, George and Mary were living as man and wife.
Meanwhile, David James had begun to dig the initial ‘Rasp’s shaft’, and the shares were attracting interest at brokers’ offices in Silverton and among the bigger pastoralists in the region. Most of the buyers were steady men in their late thirties and, as new assays brought more encouraging results, they provided a sense of stability and direction to the enterprise. Station manager Bowes Kelly had arrived from his native Galway aged eight, had grown up in country New South Wales where his father was a policeman but followed his own adventurous spirit into the pastoral industry. He took up a small parcel and quickly involved himself in the management of the mine.
Another Irishman, William R. Wilson, recently appointed manager of the Barrier Ranges Silver Mining Association, bought a one-fourteenth share for £2000 – reflecting how sharply interest in the mine’s potential was rising – and brought much-needed mining experience to the consortium. In September 1884, they had engaged geologist Norman Taylor, who declared that the ridge beneath the ironstone cap might well contain the biggest and most extraordinary lode of silver – lead ore in his experience. But it was the jackaroo Philip Charley who chanced upon a chunk of silver chloride in a pile of lead carbonate dumped outside the shaft. When he cracked it open, the chlorides sparkled in the sunlight. He had seen just such a phenomenon in Silverton a few days before.
William Jamieson, the surveyor shareholder, reacted immediately and had a boatswain’s chair rigged up inside the shaft to examine the side more closely. It glittered in the lamplight, and samples assayed at 600 ounces of silver to the ton – encouraging but still not decisive. Shortly afterwards, an old miner, Thomas Low, approached Jamieson with ‘confidential information’. At a certain hollow by the hill, he told him, he had discovered a pile of silver chlorides. He would reveal the location, he said, provided Jamieson kept it secret for a month so Low could obtain a share before the news broke.
Jamieson agreed. According to journalist and historian Alan Trengove, ‘When he was shown the spot, Jamieson realised that the chlorides had fallen from a deceptively burnished outcrop high above, and that the discovery might be richly promising. He asked an Aboriginal boy named Harry Campbell to smash open the rock with a sledgehammer – and it cascaded silver.’ 5
Low bought his share but failed to hold it until the coming bonanza.
Each syndicate member was now called upon to contribute £100 as working capital, and they appointed Jamieson as general manager at an annual salary of £500. More miners were engaged and new shafts sunk.
A cross-cut at 40 metres revealed a silver lode some seven metres across. Suddenly, it seemed that true riches were within their grasp. Little did they realise that further along the lode measured no less than 170 metres, making it the most valuable ore body of its kind in the planet’s crust.
However, the syndicate partners knew it was time to float a public company to exploit the discovery. They elected McCulloch, Jamieson, Kelly and Wilson to draw up a prospectus for the new business entity: The Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited. They capped the number of shares at 16,000, with a nominal value of £20 each – 14,000 to be retained by the syndicate as paid up to £19 and the remainder offered to the public at £9 each. From the £18,000 realised, £3000 would go to the proprietors to defray their expenses to date and the remainder to develop the mine.
Hopes were high as Jamieson – in a suit borrowed from fellow ‘provisional director’ Bill Wilson – set out for Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney to promote the share issue. But the rough-and-ready prospectus did not engender quite the enthusiasm they had hoped for. While Adelaide and Sydney took up the combined 1000 shares on offer, Melbourne investors turned up their noses and Jamieson was able to unload only 162 shares of the 500 allocated to the influential southern bourse. The remaining 338 were reallocated to Silverton, which had already taken up its allotted 500.
As Jamieson made the long journey back to the small settlement they planned to call Willyama, Harry Campbell made another find. In the soft surface at the boundary between blocks 11 and 12, he uncovered specimens of ore within a mass of kaolin and quartz. He put them in a bucket and carried them into the manager’s hut at the base of the broken hill. They would assay an astonishing 18,000 ounces of silver to the ton.
Harry had lifted the lid to the treasure chest.
Charles Rasp had never deviated from the pursuit of his German coquette. In his increasingly frequent journeys to Adelaide as word of the discovery spread, he moved up from the camp bed on the banks of the Torrens to the Exchange Hotel, and on his visits to Kindermann’s coffee shop he pressed his suit with gifts and outings. As the gifts sparkled, so too did Agnes’s eyes. But he was not without competition, and according to Archie Watson he used one-eighth of a one-seventh share to ‘buy off’ an ostler who duly ‘faded from the scene’. 6
Some months later – in late 1885 – he returned to Adelaide ‘vastly excited’. ‘Archie, I’m now a wealthy man,’ he told Watson. ‘I’m worth £20,000; I’m going for a trip to Germany and I’m going to marry Agnes.’ 7
Agnes accepted his proposal and they married in Adelaide on 22 July 1886. Rasp took his bride to Broken Hill to gaze upon the source of his wealth. Agnes became the only woman to go underground in Rasp’s Shaft but could not leave quickly enough. Back in Adelaide, the newlyweds moved into a mansion called Willyama and soon afterwards they travelled to Germany. ‘By the time he reached Hamburg,’ Archie Watson told his friends, ‘his shares were worth £200,000. Not long after his return their value was over two million.’ 8
Charles and Agnes Rasp travelled widely; the years 1900–1902 found them in Europe visiting the Niederwald National Monument near Frankfurt, built in 1871 to honour the dead of the Franco-Prussian War. The names included that of Emanuel Raspe. It was, perhaps, an unnerving experience for Charles Rasp. Had he been recognised as the deserter Jerome von Pereira, he would have faced a firing squad.
Agnes had social aspirations. The Rasps met Baron Field Marshal Richard von und zu Eisenstein in the fashionable resort town of Carlsbad, Bohemia, and invited him to visit them in Adelaide, which he did the following year. According to Watson, Agnes was cloyingly attentive to her guest. 9 While the social whirl spun endlessly at Willyama, Charles preferred to spend his time reading in his extensive library or smoking and talking with Archie and a few intimate friends. On 21 May 1907, he suffered a heart attack and fell dead behind a large sofa. His body was not discovered until the following day.
The other members of the original syndicate of seven also had their lives transformed – for good and ill – by the great discovery. Mary Smith Maygar gave birth to George McCulloch’s child, Alexander, in Melbourne in 1887, but since they were not married she gave the baby’s father’s name as Maygar. In 1892, George and Mary travelled to the UK, and the following year they married quietly at the London Registry Office before settling in a magnificent new home at 184 Queen’s Gate, South Kensington. There, George lived the life of a gentleman of leisure and patron of the arts. He represented BHP in the British capital but rarely allowed his duties to interfere with his private indulgences. He died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1907, just over six months after Charles Rasp, the man who changed his life. He was 59.
Mary remarried in 1909 to the artist James Coutts Michie, and her work for the Red Cross in the Great War earned her a CBE. Her son Alexander Maygar McCulloch won the Diamond Sculls at the Henley Regatta and became an Olympic silver medallist in the London Games of 1908. Alexander married twice. His first wife, Lesley, remarried the brother of Egypt’s obese, spendthrift monarch King Farouk. Alexander died in 1951 in England.
Mary returned to Broken Hill for a visit in 1925. By then, the Government House homestead was a ruin; she returned to her gracious Surrey home, which she had named Broken Hill. She died there after an eventful and truly remarkable life in 1945.
Philip Charley had been nearing his 22nd birthday when BHP was floated in 1885. His eight years of service in the outback had not only restored his health but also made him immensely wealthy. In 1886, he married 18-year-old Clara Evans of Adelaide and took his bride on a world tour. He then bought the historic property of Belmont Park at North Richmond on the Hawkesbury River, where he built a 25-roomed mansion and established a horse and cattle stud. He also imported the first Rolls-Royce into Australia – a 1907 Silver Ghost. Philip and Clara had five sons and three daughters; one son, also named Philip, was knighted in 1968 for services to the Royal Agricultural Society. Philip senior died in Sydney in 1937.
Following the launch of BHP, David James returned to Kapunda, where he bought a farm a few kilometres outside the township. He became mayor of Kapunda, chairman of the Kapunda Herald and president of both the Agricultural Society and the Racing Club. He established a racing stud on his property, Coalbrook Vale, and his filly, Auraria, won the Melbourne Cup in 1895. He was elected to the South Australian House of Assembly in 1902 and remained an unobtrusive backbencher for 16 years. He died in Adelaide on 21 July 1926, aged 72.
James Poole took up farming at Cunderdin, in Western Australia, but was compelled to abandon his property because of drought. He returned to Kapunda, where, in the closing years of his life, he was employed by Sir Sidney Kidman. He died in Kapunda on 29 September 1924, aged 76.
George Urquhart married in Melbourne and returned with his wife to the outback. He was manager of Tickalara station in southern Queensland for the Kidman interests and later settled with his wife and two sons at Black Hill station, near Silverton, which he managed for Kidman. On 14 May 1915, his horse returned riderless to the hut of shepherd Albert George Sutton, who found Urquhart’s body where he had fallen, after suffering a fatal heart attack, aged 70.
After a suitable period of grieving the death of Charles Rasp, Agnes broached the outer defences of European high society and became engaged to the aged Baron Eisenstein, whose debts she repaid. But he died in a London hotel on the eve of their wedding. Indeed, according to Archie Watson, ‘He took one more look at Agnes; drew his pistol; and shot his brains out all over her.’ 10 Undaunted, Agnes switched her affections to another penniless German aristocrat, Count von Zedtwitz, whom she married in London in April 1914.
When the First World War broke out, the Count and Countess von Zedtwitz were in Berlin, where they remained until the war was over. The Count died soon afterwards, and Agnes returned to Adelaide in 1920 to discover that her assets had been confiscated by the Australian Government, which classified her as an enemy alien. In 1921, a special act of parliament, sponsored by Prime Minister Billy Hughes, reinstated most of her possessions, including her BHP shares, but by now she had become mentally unstable. At Willyama , tended by her faithful maid Anna, she converted the major part of her fortune to hard cash and hid it around the mansion. She barred the doors and windows and became a recluse until her death, childless, in 1936, aged 79.