Henry James Evans

Henry James Evans, commonly known as Harry Evans (1912 - 1990), was the leading exploration geologist and discoverer of the immense bauxite deposits near Weipa, on the west coast of Cape York Peninsula in northern Queensland, Australia.

Henry Evans was born on 7 November, 1912, in Greymouth, a mining centre on the west coast of the South Island of New Zealand. After graduating from high school he studied geology at the Reefton School of Mines. After working evaluating gold dredging areas on the west coast and later for a tin mining company, he joined New Zealand Petroleum as senior geologist in 1938 and spent six years with them before spending most of 1945 assessing the resources of the Greymouth Coal Basin with the New Zealand Geological Survey.

In 1946 he moved to Australia joining the Zinc Corporation (now Rio Tinto) and worked for them looking for oil, gas in Australia, uranium at Rum Jungle, and for potash in the U.K.

In 1955, he was asked to lead a group of American oil explorers to Cape York Peninsula, Sir Maurice Mawby suggested he should also search other minerals such as phosphate or bauxite. Prospects for oil seemed poor, but Evans did collect some samples of the reddish-brown pebbles on their way to the Weipa Mission Station, suspecting they might be contain bauxite. While at Weipa he could see the red cliffs at Hey Point across the Emberly River, but had no boat to reach them.

The samples he had collected proved to be bauxite, creating great interest. Evans returned to Weipa in October, with a dinghy and outboard motor.

He examined 84 km of the coastline to the south of Weipa, noting the huge extent of the bauxite deposits. Evans was unaware at the time that the striking red cliffs along the coast had been remarked on much earlier when the Dutch ship Duyfken under Willem Janszoon charted the shores of Gulf of Carpentaria, making landfall at the Pennefather River in the Gulf of Carpentaria (the first authenticated European discovery of Australia), and again, in 1802, by Matthew Flinders.

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