Phil Brady

Philip Francis “Phil” Brady was born in 1871 at Farrell Flat, South Australia, to Irish immigrant parents Peter and Anne Brady. He married Mary Ann Fitzgerald in 1904, and they had two sons, Philip Thomas (“Tom”) and Harold, both born at White Cliffs.

Brady and his brother Tom were early buyers at White Cliffs, where they held leases from the 1890s into the early 1900s. By May 1909 they had moved to Lightning Ridge and setting up buying offices in Mrs Kirkpatrick’s boarding house at Old Town. When the boarding house was destroyed by fire later that year, Phil lost a quantity of opal, worth around £1,700. Around the same time the brothers built one of the first “proper” houses in the New Town, a Federation-style residence later to be known as The Walford House.

Brady was among the best known buyers on the Ridge prior to World War I.

“He would shout down the shaft, “Any opal?”
They would send it up in the bucket.
Phil Brady would write out a cheque, and let it flutter down the shaft.
His favourite expression to a seller, “Don’t be a fool man. Take half. I give you half.””
— The Lightning Ridge Book, Stuart Lloyd, 1967, p. 16

In December 1918 Brady left Lightning Ridge, moving to land near Bollon, Queensland. He returned in 1919 during the Bald Hill rush, and again in the early 1920s, when he brought his sons. By the mid ‘20s the family had settled in Sydney, where Brady and sons had an opal cutting workshop at Waverley. The business at one point employed around forty people.

Brady died at Randwick on 14 June 1949, aged 78.

Phil Brady’s signature sourced from a petition to resist the relocation of residents from Old Town and The Flat to the surveyed town, 1912.

Article: Research by Leisa Carney, edited by Russell Gawthorpe. LRHS research compiled by Len Cram and Barbara Moritz. Sources: The Lightning Ridge Book, Stuart Lloyd, 1967, pp. 15-16, 32, 51, 108, 242; Lightning Ridge - The Home of the Black Opal: Unique to the World, Gan Bruce, 1983, pp. 40; Walgett Spectator, 8 May 1909, 29 October 1909, 10 December 1909, 12 December 1918, 19 June 1919, 6 April 1922, 3 May 1923; A Journey With Colour: A History of Lightning Ridge Opal 1873-2003, Len Cram, 2003, pp. 88-89, 95-96, 105, 138.