One evening on a desolate stretch of outback highway between Kalgoorlie and Esperance, as darkness cloaked the vast Western Australian outback plains, the trajectory of Ron Manners’ life was changed forever.

He was just 17 and at the wheel of his parents’ car with his family in tow. In the distance, the headlights of an oncoming truck blinked into view. 

Suddenly, without warning, a massive piece of machinery that was carelessly overhanging from the truck’s rear sliced through the side of the car.

When it passed, it took with it half of Ron’s right arm.

By the time his father got him to 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 so 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 is 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 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.”

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

This monumental episode in the twilight of his teenage years has in many ways become the story of Ron’s life: listen to the experts, then prove them wrong.

There was legal fallout from the accident, of course. The truck driver was drunk, so there was no question about his guilt. The Manners family hired Kalgoorlie’s best legal gun, Senator Seddon Vincent, to argue their case.

But five minutes after stood up in court, ready to testify. Vincent collapsed in a full epileptic seizure.

“That was the first time I’d seen an epileptic fit,” Ron recalls. “It was spectacular, really.”

The judge refused to adjourn, insisting the trial go ahead regardless. A junior clerk from the Kalgoorlie legal office stepped in and was so badly out of his depth that he forgot to claim damages. The Manners family walked away with nothing but medical cost coverage.

“It was a complete disaster,” Ron laments. “But we just moved on.”

Before the accident, music had been a key source of joy and pleasure for Ron. He had a deep love for the piano and, cheekily, had stolen his grandfather’s clarinet from the coffin just before his funeral and burial.

That day one dream was seemingly ended, the other salvaged.

Post-accident, Ron could never again play the piano. But his father saw to it that the clarinet would remain within reach.

Charles Manners approached the local music shop in Kalgoorlie to design a special clarinet so his son’s fingers could still reach the keys.

Ron recalls his father saying sternly to the music shop owner:  “I don’t want to hear about what doesn’t fit, I want to hear about what you can do to make it fit?” 

The owner thought about it for a while before quoting fifteen pounds to have one custom made. Charles was filled with glee as he happily paid the sum.

Later, Ron taught himself to play trumpet with one hand. Ingenious as ever, he crafted a bracket to support the instrument, freeing three fingers to work the valves.

During one hospital stint after the accident, he would sneak out at midnight in his pyjamas to practise in a nearby phone box. The nurses would cover for him.

One evening, a doctor asked, “Where’s young Manners?”  When he was told, the doctor could not believe it.

Ron has always had mining in his blood. 

His great grandfather, William Manners, left school in Scotland at the age of eight and became a shipbuilder.

At the age of 26 William took a job as a ship’s carpenter, jumped ship and went looking for gold at Ballarat in September 1853, about a year before the Eureka Stockade, a rebellion that Ron would later describe as “Australia’s first tax revolt.”

Another reason for him jumping ship was that he fell in love with a young passenger on the ship and they eventually married and she moved to join him in Ballarat just 9 days before the Ballarat Rebellion.

On the fateful Sunday morning of the Eureka stockade William was home with his new bride, but then became involved in the general pandemonium and had some contact with the police and troopers.

Many of the prospectors were actually killed by the over zealous “troopers” or were subsequently jailed.

In 2004, Ron was invited to present the keynote speech at the 150th commemoration of the Eureka uprising, and he wore his great grandfather’s legacy with quiet pride.

William Manners continued prospecting and producing gold from his Queen Victoria Mine and later at the Smeaton Reserve Mine and lived out his life in Ballarat until his death in 1901.

Ron’s maternal great grandfather, Pietro Tamo, from Switzerland, who also left school at age 8, became a builder and built the church in the Swiss town of Sonogno before leaving Switzerland at age 19 to search for gold.

It took him 18 months to get to Ballarat, arriving in 1856, too late for the Eureka event and too late for the early Ballarat opportunities.

He worked hard at prospecting from 1856, but found only sufficient gold to subsist and raise a family until he died of a heart attack aged 43.

As a commentary on the hardships of those times, these two Ballarat families of Ron’s great grandfathers produced a total of 15 children, of which 6 (more than a third) died at age eighteen months or younger.

Ron’s paternal grandfather, W.G. Manners, was one of those that survived.

He was one of the first two engineering graduates from the Ballarat School of Mines.

He then worked on the Ballarat mines before moving westward to Broken Hill and then subsequently to Kanowna and Kalgoorlie where he founded a mining engineering firm in 1895 that he called WG Manners, which designed and built plants in Kalgoorlie. 

In 1985, Ron decided to celebrate the 88th anniversary of WG opening his first engineering office at Kanowna, when WGM arrived there from Ballarat as the consulting engineer for the Golden Crown Mine,

“I thought I was pretty clever finding amongst the old boxes of family history a street map of Kanowna on which was marked “Manners”, along with the other locations of various landmarks. We then proceeded to pour a concrete slab and put a plaque on the top explaining the event. We gathered 50 or so friends together on the day, had a party and gave a rousing cheer for the early pioneers,” Ron says.

Charles Manners’ education at the Ballarat Agricultural College was interrupted midway through due to the collapse of the family’s farming venture at Denmark.

He subsequently returned to Kalgoorlie, where he had spent his childhood, to take over the family business when his father WG developed cancer in 1923.

There were no mineral or market booms to lift everyone out of the survival tedium during Charles’ thirty three years of business on the Goldfields.

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, the first ruler in history to mint gold coins.  

It also happened to be the name of the street where he spent much of his childhood and many of his subsequent years in Kalgoorlie.

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

But the gold eventually ran out. In 2006, nine months after Ron 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.

In 2022, Ron pulled a 1kg bar of gold from his personal stash, one he’d hoarded for four decades, and traded it in for a new Lexus. 

He fondly remembers the moment he poured his first gold bar, with its feeling of utter weight, heat, and immense promise.  “That feeling has stayed with me my whole life,” he says.

Ron became emeritus chairman of the Australian Mining Hall of Fame and is now renowned as a legend of the local industry.

The Mannwest Group marked its 130th anniversary in December 2024, a rare milestone in an industry known for its booms and busts. 

As a proponent of the free market economic model, Ron 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 eight 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.

Ron first showed an interest in the concept of humility at about the age of 17, when reading the 1823 book of Thomas Moore titled, “The Loves of the Angels”.

“Probably at the age of 17, I completely misinterpreted it, however I still remember the words: ‘Humility, that low, sweet root, from which all heavenly virtues shoot’. Can we have humility without being humble? Yes!,” he says.

“The Oxford dictionary definition of humble is “having a low estimate of one’s self”. I don’t think that any of us wish to be without self-esteem, however humility according to the Macquarie dictionary is “having a modest sense of one’s significance”. I would like to tamper with that definition by simply adding another sentence: “and a realistic sense of everyone’s true potential”.

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” as an answer.  Just as Ron’s father fatefully did on that dark night in a Kalgoorlie hospital many decades ago.

“I learned early that experts can give you good advice,” Ron 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, Ron quietly mouths a single sentence: “This would not be much fun with one hand.  Thanks Dad.”

Ron Manners was born on the 8th of January, 1936, not in a traditional hospital but in what passed for one in those days in Kalgoorlie, a modest house with a few extra beds known as “Karitane”, at 72 Ward Street.

It was before the days of maternity wards.

His early years were spent mostly at another modest home in Croesus Street, Kalgoorlie, apart from brief stints in nearby locations.

It was a quiet, almost secretive little lane at the Mt Charlotte end of Kalgoorlie.

“Very few people actually know where it is. There’s only eight houses in the street,” Ron says.

On one side of the street was a delightful open space called the old Victoria Park.

It was there that Ron began what he called his “standard antic” every Sunday morning.

With three fellow six-year-old friends, he would head to the park armed with cotton lines, bent pins and soft bread.

“We used to haul in the goldfish,” he says, describing the goldfish pond that had replaced the former Kalgoorlie swimming pool behind the infant health centre.

“We were just in it for the sport.”

But one particular Sunday was anything but routine.

“I recall one morning we arrived over there and we found a pyjama-clad man floating face down in the middle of the goldfish pond.”

The boys, lines already cast, managed to hook the body and drag it to the edge.

“I guess in doing it we built up a bit of speed… his head hit the concrete at a fairly rapid rate. I’ve always presumed he was already dead… but I’ve always had that little worry in my mind.”

Only being in it for the sport, they threw him back. At the age of six, it didn’t really mean much to Ron.

But when he returned home and told his father over breakfast what had happened that morning, the response was swift.

He still recalls being impressed with the speed at which Charles Manners made several hurried phone calls and disappeared for an hour while the matter was sorted out.

Roughly two years later, Ron’s tranquil street erupted again when he heard a loud explosion coming from the same park.

His mother, Nancy, told him it was likely tree stumps being removed. Ron ran over to investigate and arrived just in time to witness a grotesque aftermath.

“There was just this pair of hips sitting on the stand in the rotunda bandstand… all the rest of this fellow was over the ceiling,” he says.

Someone nearby claimed to have seen the man sitting reading a newspaper “smoking”, but the cigarette was actually a stick of gelignite with a fuse attached.  The result looked and sounded like a bomb going off.

Ron vividly recalls helping the undertaker collect the remains.

“The memorable thing of that occasion was the look on my mother’s face when I got home with blood right up to my elbows,” he quips.

Despite the gore and surrealism of his early years, Ron recalls his childhood with wonder.

“I can’t imagine growing up anywhere else,” he says. His sister, Frances, was three years younger.  “Every day was an adventure.”

Life was simpler back then and more self-sufficient.

“We just walked to school, mainly barefoot. Later I rode my bike, because with a bike you could go anywhere,” he says.

Ron’s first, precious Malvern Star was inherited from his maternal grandfather, known as “Pom Pom” Stevens, a prospector, clarinet player, and choir master.

He was known as ‘Pom Pom’ because he walked around the house regularly humming ‘pom, pom, pom.’” Nobody, including Ron, seemed to know his real name.

Pom Pom stood an imposing six foot, five inches tall, with his tobacco-stained beard lending him the air of a bush legend. 

Pom Pom and Ron’s maternal grandmother lived in a one-room house with a couple of small bedrooms tucked away on the side in the seaside town of Esperance, about four hours drive south of Kalgoorlie.

Pom Pom was something of an artist at chewing tobacco and the Esperance house had four kerosene tin spittoons set in each corner of the main living room. 

“If Pom Pom walked in from one corner, he would fire his spittle into the diagonally opposite spittoon and never miss.  It certainly impressed me as a six year old,” Ron says.

But what seemed strange to Ron, in hindsight, was the total absence of any meaningful conversation with his grandfather.

“Pom Pom never spoke to me. Back then, grandchildren were just something to be tolerated… I respected his desire to detest me, and I responded with admiration.”

One evening after 11pm Ron was stirred from his sleep by a noise in the main living room.

He snuck up to the door that was slightly ajar and peered into the room to see Pom Pom, fresh from a big night at the pub, with four large brown-paper parcels containing strings of sausages. Silently, the old man removed every framed picture from the walls, hung the sausages on the vacant nails, and wound up his Edison phonograph.

“He cranked it up and I heard some magnificent J.P. Sousa marches,” Ron says.

Then came the encore performance. Pom Pom climbed a chair, lowered the bell of his clarinet into the phonograph’s horn and played the most amazing music.

To the young boy in the shadows, the performance was magical. 

After playing each piece Pom Pom turned around, still standing on the chair, and bowed at all the sausages. 

“To me in that moment it was just fabulous. I was captured by the connection between my grandfather and his instrument. It clearly meant so much to him,’ Ron says.

“So in the true spirit of that moment, I imagined the sausages cheering in return.”

Ron’s childhood took an unexpected turn at the age of nine when Pom Pom died from a heart attack.

The big man got on his bike one day to go to the local post office to collect the mail but when he arrived, he dropped dead inside on the floor. 

It was a time of immense grief for the family.  But also, unwittingly, Ron’s grandfather would continue to be force in his life, even in death.

His parents, occupied with their own lives, made a decision that in hindsight seemed quietly strategic.

“They said, ‘Ron, you must go down there to Esperance for a year. You can look after your grandmother.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s okay, I’ll do that no trouble.’”

So Ron boarded the train destined to comfort his bereaved grandmother and perhaps, to be softened by the burden of responsibility. 

“I realise now they were smart,” Ron says of his parent’s decision.  “I must have been a bit of a problem child. This way they kept my grandmother company, and maybe settled me down too.”

Esperance in the 1950s was remote, sparse and slightly primitive. 

There was no refrigeration and anyone that passed away was never buried in a hurry.

This was the case for Pom Pom, as his widow waited for her relatives to come from Kalgoorlie or Bunbury. So for three or four days her late husband simply lay in bed as if he was hung over from one of his big nights out at the pub.

It was during those days that a quiet family debate unfolded about what to do with Pom Pom’s beloved clarinet.

“He was so passionate about it, they were going to bury it with him,” Ron says.

“But I thought, ‘He would be much happier if it continued in the world creating music.’ So I nicked it. I didn’t say anything to anyone about it, I just hid it. I only revealed its presence years later.”

It was the first of several defining heists in Ron’s early life.

Then Esperance, far from being grim, turned out to be something of a child’s paradise.

“We had neighbours with horses and we would borrow them and ride around the bush. It was a Huckleberry Finn kind of life. My mate’s name was Harold ‘Zombie’ Martin. We had great adventures,” Ron says.

When he returned to Kalgoorlie, Ron brought back Pom Pom’s Malvern Star bike and it became the chariot for his next venture: paper delivery.

At the age of ten Ron started selling The Daily News newspaper after school each day.

Like so many Kalgoorlie kids, he was desperate to gain financial independence while still enjoying himself.

The experience came with several memorable episodes. 

The first scored him a free meal one bleak winter’s night when a little old lady, seemingly mistaking Ron for some homeless orphan and feeling sorry for him, invited him into her home for supper. 

Little wonder he had difficulty eating the meal put in front of him by his mother when he eventually returned home, his second for the evening.

Another incident of Ron’s early years showcased the darker side of Kalgoorlie, coupled with the innocence of youth.

“Some guy approached me and asked me where the brothels were,” Ron says.

“I had no idea what a brothel was so he started gesticulating with his hands and fingers, making like a puppet show and I said, ‘Oh, you mean the knockers’ and pointed the way. ‘First turn left, you can’t miss it.”

Eventually decades in the salt air of seaside Esperance got the better of Pom Pom’s bike. 

The spokes became completely rusted through and one day they all disintegrated, sending the bike into the ground with a thud.

Half of Ron’s paper boy earnings bought him a replacement; the other half he proudly gave to his mother, drawing something of a line in the sand to stake a claim for his financial independence.

He was soon onto his next scheme: crystal radio sets. 

These were rudimentary devices consisting of germanium crystal threaded with a fine steel wire known as a 'cat's whisker', which was connected by copper wires to a variable condenser.  Remarkably, without a battery, they allowed the user to listen to a bunch of radio stations through an attached set of headphones.

They didn't cost much to make but Ron could mount all the bits and pieces on a nice polished aluminium base and sell them for 5 pounds.

“So without my parent’s knowledge I put a sign up by the gate that read: ‘Crystal sets for sale.’ Spelt C-H-R-Y-S-T-A-L,” Ron says.

”Ten minutes later a lady knocked on our door and said, ‘Young man, you don’t know how to spell crystal’.  But I got her order.”

By his teens, Ron was building “one-valve” radio sets with batteries and speakers. The budding entrepreneur had found his groove.

Going to school at the Kalgoorlie Central School near the centre of town was a cultural education for Ron.  Half the students were Aboriginal, bussed in from the nearby Kurrawang Mission.

“They were cleaner and better dressed than us, plus they wore shoes. Most of us didn’t. They were also top students and brilliant runners. I maintain good friendships to this day with many of them,” he says.

Later in life, Ron and his first wife even informally adopted an abandoned Aboriginal baby named Brucey. 

“There was nothing formal about it,” he says.

“We just had the baby for a while. Nobody thought about people being black or white in those days.”

When Brucey’s mother returned, they handed him back, but stayed in touch with her.

Music also ran through Ron’s youth like a current. 

His mother was a great pianist, and she made sure her son received piano lessons from a very early age. 

Ron jokes that his first exposure to timelines was as a 15-year-old. His mother was alarmed that he was learning music without being introduced to the ways in which the great composers influenced each other.

“From that point on I have become a ‘timeline nut’. For instance, I have used a similar timeline to show how the great economists either influenced each other or ignored each other and often repeated the same mistakes, generation after generation,” he says.

While the fateful car accident in his final school year injured his arm and put a halt to his piano performances, it did nothing to curb his enthusiasm for study of the subject.

He continued that year doing four extra levels of music theory and it was the only subject he passed for what is now know as the ATR, short for Australian Tertiary Entrance Rank.

Playing jazz returned in his adult years, when Ron joined a regular Wednesday night band at the Exchange Hotel in Kalgoorlie.

“These were some of the best nights of my life. The group was anchored by a strong trumpet player from England whose name was Alan.  We always suspected he might have been hiding from more than musical obscurity, thinking he was probably living in Kalgoorlie on the run from the Family Law Court in the UK or similar,” Ron says.

But that vibrant period ended in tragedy one night when Greg Dawson, the band’s keyboard player, tried to separate a bunch of drunken Aboriginals fighting in the street.

They knocked him over, kicked his head in and he died instantly, bringing an abrupt and tragic end to the band.

The clarinet stayed in Ron’s life through a famed English clarinetist and vocalist named Bernard Stanley "Acker" Bilk, known for his 1960s hit Stranger on the Shore, his smooth playing and his dapper stage presence.

Ron first met him at the One Hundred Club on Oxford Street in London.

“We were alongside each other at the urinal. We were standing there, as you do, and I thought, ‘I cannot believe it, Acker Bilk is standing next to me.’ I introduced myself and he replied with, “I’m Acker.” I always remember we laughingly had to change hands to shake hands with each other,” Ron recalls.

Some years later Acker Bilk came to Kalgoorlie with his band and performed at the Kalgoorlie Town Hall. After his concert he was signing CD’s and Ron spoke with him again. He remembered their meeting years before, thousands of miles away in London.

When Acker had finished signing CDs, his trumpet player Colin Smith said to Ron, “Acker is tired and wants to go to bed, but it is too early for me. Is there any jazz around here?”

Ron replied, “Come with me and I will take you up to the Exchange Hotel”.

It was a Wednesday night and Alan, the trumpet player in Ron’s band, was playing his usual gig there because he was the band leader.  Ron had managed to take the night off from his regular band duties to listen to Acker Bilk.

“I was eagerly anticipating whether there would be any recognition because Colin Smith should have known all the London jazz musicians. We burst in on the group at the Exchange Hotel, the room full of patrons and strippers, the whole works.  Colin looked across the room and cried out, “Oh, it’s fookin’ Alan!’,” Ron recalls with a wide smile.

Over the hours that followed the Exchange Hotel patrons witnessed some fine duelling trumpeters at work.

Just like that, thanks to Ron, the night had lit up in Kalgoorlie once more.