from Allen Gledhill. John Gary’s great-nephew
Claimed To Be Strongest Digger On three Fields
“BURLY” McLEAN DROPS IN
by John Gary
They’re among the men who tell you that the gold rush days – the days of overnight fortunes, bare-knuckle fights, and chamois bags of gold are gone. Those days still live! They’re as rip-roaring and real as they were half a century ago, tanged with the scent of burning spinifex and loud with the noises of thirsty miners in corrugated iron pubs.
Like you, I thought those days had slipped into history until, one afternoon during the week, there was a loud knock at my door and I opened it to find the spirit of Hall’s Creek, Coolgardie, and Kalgoorlie himself – big Jack ‘Burly’ McLean, pioneer of three rushes, and reckoned by his mates to be the most powerful digger to swing a pick in this State. ‘Burly’ McLean was no stranger to me, although it was many years since I’d seen him. He’d always been something of a legendary figure in our home, and memory of him had been kept very much alive by stories of his prodigious feats of strength.
Bush Boxing Match – Australian Sketchbook by Samuel Thomas Gill
Twenty years ago “Burly” McLean threw aside his shaker and shovel after 40 years chasing the yellow stone and went back to Ballarat to make his home in the town where his gold mining forebears had lived. His flying visit to Perth during the week (typical of him) was to see a sick mate who’d shared his tucker and water and heartbreaks and luck in the “old camp” 50 years ago.
‘Burly’ McLean it was who, in the ’80s, vied with Russian Jack for the reputation of being the strongest man on the Hall’s Creek field. Both men had followers who’d have staked the contents of their gold bags to the last ounce on their champions. Russian Jack, Ï believe, was a foreigner, as broad as he was tall. He stood about 5ft. 11ins, but his tremendous depth of chest and width of shoulders made him appear short. “Burly” McLean, as I remember him 25 years ago, stood 6ft. 3ins in his stockinged feet. He had arms like pistons and hands like hams. He tipped the scales, he told me, at just over 20 stone and there wasn’t an ounce of superfluous flesh on him. And, strangely enough, along the trail that led to the Hall’s Creek rush came Russian Jack and “Burly” McLean, just about the same time.
Russian Jack made his reputation by wheeling his sick pal in a wheelbarrow over the last 200 miles to the Creek. His mate had fallen ill at Fitzroy Crossing (about midway between Derby and Hall’s Creek) and Russian Jack promptly put him in the barrow and wheeled him through 200 miles of alternately the sandiest, roughest, thickest country in the State.
“Didn’t know he wasn’t a bag of feathers”. Russian Jack told the diggers at the Creek when they whistled in amazement. That, of course, set the seal on his reputation with the men. But what wrote finish to his stay at Hall’s Creek was the day he was sacked for, in a fit of temper, bending an inch and a half crowbar over his knee! “Burly” McLean’s claim to fame was different. He was down a 60 foot shaft the day the ladder gave way and his mate had his 2 legs broken under him. With the injured man’s arms around his neck and hanging on, pick-a-back fashion, McLean shinned up the 60 feet water pipe to the surface then, without a spell, carried the man two miles to the nearest help.
On another occasion, he roped a horse and pulled it out of a hole where it had become hopelessly bogged in Kimberley mud almost up to its neck. I couldn’t get “Burly” McLean to talk about these things. He was more interested in seeking information about, and wondering how time and fortune had treated the old-timers-men like Pat Lamond, Sammy Robinson, Doug Sheedy, George Shaw and his other mates who, he maintained, he “walked out on” to go and live a life of luxury in Ballarat.
Last time I’d seen “Burly” McLean he was wearing a sweat-stained felt hat, a thick, sleeveless flannel, dungarees, and a pair of Bluchers. Down his face rivulets of perspiration ran in the red dust, as he shook his old “shaker,” listening hopefully for anything that sounded like the drag of heavy metal over the wire sieve. As he sat, I thought somewhat uncomfortably, on the lounge, legs crossed and his huge fists buried in his trouser pockets, that tailored suit he wore still couldn’t hide the tremendous frame that carried it.
This is the illustration of an old-style strongman
His 83 years have slightly stooped him, his face is furrowed, and there’s not much of his top thatch left. But, he’ll tell you with pride. “I can still make those scales show just on 15 stone, and the way I feel I’ve got no right to be loafing, I ought to be out on the end of a pick and shovel.” As we sat there, “Burly” talked and I listened, prompting him only when he seemed to sink into a reverie. And in those few hours, I relived days in the Hall’s Creek rush and on the Pilbara fields; weeks of pitiless trudging along the trails back of Coolgardie and Hannans. I had meals at Old Ma Pead’s boarding house, and I listened to the judgments of Warden Owen in his bush courts. I helped to capture Horneg, who murdered his mate, Johansen the Swede, and then I asked Burly, “Do you know of anything more romantic in the history of rushes in this State than the fluke find by Hannan and his mates after they’d given up looking for gold and were looking for water?”
And “Burly” McLean laughed. He laughed the laugh of a man upon whom memories roll heavily. “Yes,” he said, “I do. The most romantic, and the most humorous incident connected with a gold rush in this State opened up the Pilbara fields a few years after Hall’s Creek.” He told me the story I’d often heard before of the Withnell boy picking up a stone to throw at a crow and the subsequent telegram to Perth that inadvertently omitted news of the first gold find on the field.
And now “Burly” McLean is back in the luxury of his Ballarat home. Time has passed on since he last pushed a shaker, but I raise my hat to one of the old brigade.
The roaring 80’s and 90’s will never die while he and his mates live.
Moya Sharp
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