Russian Jack

Ivan Fredericks ( – 17 April 1904), known as Russian Jack, was a sailor from Arkhangelsk who became a gold prospector in Western Australia. He arrived in the Kimberley during the gold rush of 1886 and became known across the colony's goldfields for wheeling a sick prospector to Halls Creek in his wheelbarrow. The story was retold in many versions and became part of the folklore of the Western Australian goldfields. A statue of Fredericks was unveiled in Halls Creek in 1979, and in 2000 the Russian community of Perth placed a memorial on his previously unmarked grave.

Early life Fredericks came from Arkhangelsk, the port on the White Sea that his death certificate names as his birthplace. The year of birth on his headstone, 1864, is contradicted by later research, which places it around 1852 and makes him about 52 when he died. Contemporaries took him for a Finn. Some later writers have suggested that his original name was John Frederick Kirkoss.

Later years

The Kimberley field was soon worked out, and Fredericks followed the later rushes south. He spent some years in the Pilbara and then on the Murchison, where he was a familiar figure at Cue in the 1890s and where Thomson saw him in the crowd at a political meeting addressed by John Forrest. Thomson wrote that he was among the first at almost every new find but never struck it rich. He always paid his way, and he was better known for breaking up fights than for starting them. The bronze statue, which shows Fredericks pushing a prostrate man in a wheelbarrow, stands outside the shire offices in Halls Creek. Its plaque, unveiled on 11 August 1979 by the Minister for Housing and member for Kimberley, K. A. Ridge, dedicates the monument to all the pioneers of the Kimberley and says that his feat "symbolised the mateship and endurance of a region then lacking all the amenities of civilisation". Bridge's biography, published two years later by Hesperian Press, set out to separate the documented record from what he called journalistic invention.