Boddington Who's Who
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Distinguished and Famous people from Boddington
Boddington's documented stories include an educator who recorded the district's history and a young resident who won an unusual opportunity in aviation. Their connections arise from local work and residence, rather than an assumed birthplace.
📚 John Ferrell
Historian and educator John Ferrell served as principal of Boddington District High School from 1981 to 1993. The shire commissioned him to write Becoming Boddington, published in 1992 to mark a century of local government. Drawing on documents, photographs and oral history, the book followed the district from nineteenth-century settlement to the development of its gold mine. Ferrell also worked on parliamentary oral histories and helped establish the Western Australian branch of the Oral History Association. His OAM in 2018 recognised service to community history in Western Australia.
✈️ Bill Bennell
In March 1958, Dawn reported that nineteen-year-old Bill Bennell of Boddington had won the Aircraft Owners and Pilots' Association's first Dr Mervyn Hall Memorial Aboriginal Flying Scholarship. An apprentice cooper, he had watched aircraft passing over the factory where he made barrels; his employer encouraged him to apply. Selected from thirty applicants, he travelled to Sydney for flying training. His enthusiasm grew during aptitude tests in a Chipmunk aircraft: the factory worker who had watched planes from below was being given a chance to take the controls.
🪵 Bob Hartley
Bob Hartley found work as a timber loader at Wuraming after migrating from Lancashire with his family in 1911. His father also worked at the mill, one of the public enterprises established under John Scaddan’s Labor government. Hartley later served on the Western Front and became a long-serving union official and Perth Trades Hall organiser. His duties eventually encompassed eighty affiliated unions and election campaigns, supported by a very small office staff. He maintained a firm rule against drinking during working hours, once declining a drink even with Ben Chifley. The Wuraming mill belongs to the working beginnings of that demanding public life.
