>> Go Back - page - >> List of Entriess
Noble’s dedication, faithfulness and gifts were formally recognised on 13 September 1925 when he was
ordained deacon at St George’s Cathedral, Perth. ‘The black parson’ became a well-known figure throughout
Australia, widely respected and much sought after as a speaker.
The Noble family returned to north Queensland in 1932. Within a year, Noble’s health deteriorated and he
remained ill until his death from a fall on 25 November 1941. He is buried near Ernest Gribble in the cemetery at
Yarrabah. At his funeral, it was said that he had given ‘a lifetime of devoted service to God and to his own race’.
Australian Encyclopaedia; E R Gribble, Forty Years with the Aborigines, 1930; E R Gribble, The Problem of the Australian Aboriginal, 1932;
G Higgins, James Noble of Yarabah, 1981.
JOHN HARRIS, Vol 1.NOBLE, MALACHI or MALACHY (JACK or JOHN) (1886–1966), bush worker, prospector and hotel owner,
was born in Queensland on 5 April 1886. There is nothing known about his parentage and early life but he seems
to have found employment on various north Australian cattle stations. At one stage, he married, as there is a record
of his divorce from Kathleen Maude Noble in October 1946.
According to his friend Margot Miles, he was a legend in the Kimberley district of Western Australia. ‘He was’,
Miles wrote, ‘the greatest rough-rider in the country and would round up the wild horses and yard them—no mean
feat. He would then break them in for various stations’. Noble also worked for a time as a ‘bullocky’. In about 1927
he was photographed, bearded, tall and wiry and wearing a large hat, riding a bicycle westwards from Victoria
River Downs in the Northern Territory. He later recalled that he went on to Newry for a few weeks and then left
for Bullita. His bicycle fell apart and he finished the last part of the journey on foot.
He arrived at Tennant Creek in 1932 and was there towards the end of the year when an Aborigine, Frank Juppurla,
found gold near the telegraph station. With Ralph Hadlock and Bill Garnett, he worked the Wheal Doria lease
during the following year. Noble sank holes until he found a rich reef of gold. The original parcel of ore was sent
to the Peterborough battery in South Australia for crushing. He partnered other Tennant Creek miners, including
William Weaber, who provided Noble with finance. Noble subsequently claimed that he and Weaber found and
pegged Nobles Nob, Weabers Find, Kimberley Kids and the Rising Sun mines all on the same day. The Rising Sun
and Nobles Nob both proved to be particularly rich deposits. There is, however, some doubt about Noble’s claim.
One of Weaber’s sons, Kevan, later insisted that his brother Owen found Nobles Nob and the Rising Sun.
Noble appears to have sold his interest in the mines about six months after they were opened. Geoffrey Blainey
stated that he bought a hotel in the town and ‘returned to his native Queensland for a spree... He was soon
penniless’. Margot Miles said that he purchased the Tennant Creek Hotel, where he had two camels pegged at the
back ‘When things got dull’, Miles remembered, ‘he would jump on a camel and take off into the bush’. He only
had one eye but was at home in the bush, where he spent much time studying the habits of ants. He was also
known when bored, Miles continued, to ‘tie two feather dusters to his waist and spend the whole day being an emu,
stalking around emitting loud squarks (sic)... and frightening the hell out of poor drunken blokes’. It is generally
thought that Noble did not own the hotel for long but while he may have sold the actual hotel to Alexander B Scott
before the Second World War, he owned the non-hotel buildings (‘Billiard room, shop, lean to, cordial factory,
bulk store and washhouse’) until at least 1949 and leased the land on which the whole complex stood until about
1947.
He spent most of the rest of his life in ‘the Tennant’. Hilda Tuxworth recounted that he was unsuccessful
in his application for an old age pension as he was unable to give evidence of his date of birth and birthplace.
Australian Development NL, the owners of Nobles Nob, put him on the pay roll and he prospected and did various
jobs in the mine area. The company arranged for him to enter the Old Timers’ Home in Alice Springs, paying for
his accommodation and pocket money. It was not long before he returned to Tennant Creek. ‘It was like being
in a concentration camp’, he said. He then stayed with his old friend Con Perry at the former telegraph station,
which was used as a homestead for Perry. In later life he was at last able to receive the pension and he moved to
‘Noble House’, an old timers’ home built at Tennant Creek and named in his honour. It was opened on 22 October- There he spoke to Hilda Tuxworth at a 1964 Christmas Party of his regret that he had written nothing about
his life and encouraged her to begin work on a history of Tennant Creek.
He died in the Tennant Creek Hospital on 1 June 1966. His funeral was well attended and the pallbearers
included many local pioneers. He is buried in the Tennant Creek Cemetery under a headstone erected by the
Australian Development Company and which describes him as ‘Prospector-Bushman-Gouger Founder of Nobles
Nob Mine’. Whatever the truth of the last claim, he was a great Territory character. In a published obituary he was
described as ‘one of Australia’s greatest old-time prospectors’ who had spent most of his life in a swag. It was
said of him that he had more fingers in mining pies in the area than any other man though once an ore body was
found he was off to prospect for another. Perhaps the loss of the sight of one eye affected him greatly as his estate
was left to institutions in Queensland, which had the ‘care of deaf dumb and blind children’. His will is dated
27 April 1947; Noble was in hospital at the time and he clearly expected to leave a large estate. When his will was
probated, however, five institutions shared a total of only 26 Pounds.
G Blainey, The Rush that Never Ended, rev ed, 1993; D Carment, Australia’s Depression Gold Rush, 1991; Centralian Advocate, 9 June 1966;
M Miles, The Old Tennant, 1988; Northern Territory Archives Service E113/1, E104 2836/1966; H Pearce, ‘Tennant Creek Historic Sites
Study’, Report to the National Trust of Australia (Northern Territory), 1984; H Tuxworth, Tennant Creek, 1978; H J Wilson, ‘The Heritage of
Tennant Creek’, Report to the National Trust of Australia (Northern Territory), 1995.
DAVID CARMENT, Vol 3.