ABSTRACT
Following discoveries in the 1890s that placed Western Australia as one of the great gold bearing regions of the world, prospectors Arthur Bayley, John Ford and Paddy Hannan emerged as local heroes. During the 1930s, the person in receipt of plaudits was not a prospector eulogized for making major gold discoveries, but a mining promoter and financier, Claude Albo de Bernales, who revived a field that had lain in the doldrums from the first decade of the century. With unremitting faith in the potential of the region he struggled long and hard in the London metropole to attract the capital necessary to return the local gold mining industry to its former glory. His success not only brought back life to the goldfields but also boosted local employment to ease the pain of the 1930s depression.
