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Ron Manners’ life changed forever one pitch-black evening on the highway between Kalgoorlie and Esperance in regional Western Australia when he was just 17.
“I was driving with my parents when I saw the headlights of a truck approaching,” he recalls.
“Suddenly its lights went out and we didn’t have any idea that they had overhanging machinery on the back of the truck. It tore the side of our car out and my arm went with it.
“Dad drove me straight to a hospital in Kalgoorlie. I had about nine broken bones and my right arm was a mess. I remember being sedated and sitting in a wheelchair when the doctor pointed to the top of my arm and said to his colleague: ‘We are going to take his arm off from here.” But his father was having none of it. He insisted upon flying his son to Perth the next morning for a second opinion. Nine operations later, Manners Jr’s arm remained intact. But it would be locked at the elbow in perpetuity.
A budding musician in his youth, he had loved playing the piano and the old clarinet he pinched from the coffin just before his grandfather’s burial.
Sadly he never played the former again. But after the accident his father ensured the latter passion could continue when he paid £40 to the local music shop in Kalgoorlie to design a special clarinet so his son’s fingers could still reach the keys.
“I played every Wednesday night in a jazz ensemble for 20 years, until the gold boom happened. Every couple of years something goes wrong with my arm and I’ve got to get it fixed. But every time I do my shoelaces up – you need two hands for that – I whisper to myself quietly, ‘Thanks Dad’,” Manners says with a wide smile.
“I also think because of that experience I now question everything. Things are never quite what they look.” This year his Mannwest Group celebrates its 128th anniversary. Its predecessor, WG Manners & Co, was established in 1895 when his grandfather, WG Manners – the son of a Ballarat prospector – set up a mining engineering business to design and build mining plants in Kalgoorlie.
Born with mining...