Scott Clennett will present on the following subject:
The Magnet Silver Lead Mine - The Waller Connection
George Waller had been chief brewer at the Guinness brewery in Ireland, but developed an antipathy towards alcohol, and following failure of a pottery venture in Leitrim, he, his wife and six of their surviving sons emigrated to Tasmania in 1882. Two more sons were soon born in Hobart. This is a history of three of those sons, the oldest Richard, the fourth George and the tenth and youngest, James. By 1900, Richard had become a mining engineer, and was the manager/engineer of the Magnet silver lead mine in western Tasmania and George was the Assistant Government Geologist, based in Zeehan. With their parents having returned to Ireland, Richard had become 16-year-old James’s de-facto guardian, and on leaving school in Hobart in 1899, James went to Magnet to work at the mine, initially as a navvy, and later as a miner.
Richard was building a two-foot gauge 10-mile steel-railed tramway through difficult gorge country from the mine to the EBR’s Waratah railway. In 1902, he wrote up the project as his thesis for submission applying for full membership of the Institution of Civil Engineers in London. It is possibly the most complete report of the technical aspects of such tramway construction in Australia. On the other hand, James had a very successful life as an engineer on the World scene which he wrote up in an unpublished autobiography for the benefit of grandchildren in retirement at Totnes in Devon in 1947.
This presentation will look at the legacy Richard and James left in the Tasmanian mining and Engineering history, based on their own writings.
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