The millionaire with the keenest intuition for W.A.’s love of opportunism, and who best answered, also, to its idea of flash yet at the same time reputable foreign gentlemanliness, was Claude Albo de Bernales, the mastermind of London Court, that Perth pastiche I visited on my first morning in town, where St George and the Dragon make circuits every quarter of an hour. A Londoner himself – born in Brixton, to be exact, though claiming to be of Spanish and even Basque descent – de Bernales arrived in the Coolgardie goldfields in 1897, having added an education at school in Uppingham and at university in Heidelberg to his experience of life south of the Thames. He was twenty-one when he showed up in Coolgardie, with less than a pound in his pocket for every year he still hadn’t become a millionaire. But it was not as a miner that he made his first fortune. Where there’s schmutz there’s schmuck, as they say at Heidelberg. It didn’t take the young Basque from Brixton long to work out that there was easier money to be made retrieving decrepit machinery from abandoned mines and selling it, second-hand, to new prospectors, than there was in prospecting itself. By the 1930s, he was a leading figure in the gold-mining industry, negotiating the gold bounty with the West Australian government and floating companies of his own on the London Stock Exchange. ‘Get in on the ground floor of a glittering Australian El Dorado,’ was the characteristically cross-cultural invitation which separated thirty thousand English shareholders from their six million English pounds.

The West Australian press reported de Bernales’ dealings in London with enormous pride. Under the extended heading, CLAUDE DE BERNALES – THE GENIUS BEHIND THE MINING REVIVAL – STATE’S GREATEST AMBASSADOR IN LONDON FINANCIAL CIRCLES –HOW HE MADE WILUNA A GOLDEN DREAM COME TRUE – A GREAT CREATIVE PERSONALITY, the Mirror reported: ‘Reckoning things on the basis of practical value and wide vision, Claude de Bernales must certainly rank as one of the greatest statesmen W.A. has ever known.’