Menzies Who's Who
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Colin Leel
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Distinguished and Famous people from Menzies
⛏️ Leslie Robert Menzie and John McDonald
Prospectors Leslie Robert Menzie and John McDonald were involved in the rich gold find that brought the Menzies field into prominence in 1894. Their party also included an Aboriginal tracker recorded as Jimmy and an Afghan camel driver, Cumbra, whose work helped make the expedition possible. After identifying gold-bearing ground, the prospectors hurried to register claims while their companions guarded the find. News drew other hopeful miners rapidly into the area. The town’s name recalls Menzie, not Prime Minister Robert Menzies, and the story belongs to the practical, collaborative work behind the gold rush.
🎨 Antony Gormley
Antony Gormley’s Inside Australia brought contemporary sculpture to Lake Ballard, west of Menzies, in 2003. The installation’s fifty-one figures were derived largely from scans of people living in the town, with a few passers-by also included. Their bodies were narrowed while their heights remained recognisable, creating individual presences across the broad salt-lake surface. The work was commissioned for the Perth International Arts Festival’s fiftieth anniversary. Gormley’s connection is this substantial local project: a landscape installation in which a small community supplied the human forms, making the residents part of the artwork as well as its neighbours.
🏦 Jack Gabbedy
Jack Gabbedy was born at Menzies in 1906, the eldest of seven children of an engine driver and his wife. The family moved to Fremantle in 1912. He later worked on Western Australia’s group settlement scheme and rose through country banking to become a commissioner of the Rural and Industries Bank. His interests were unusually broad: competitive woodchopping, disaster relief and historical writing all found a place alongside finance. In retirement he published a two-volume history of group settlement. Menzies supplies the birthplace in a life subsequently spent working with the State’s rural industries, communities and institutions.
