Irishman Creek Station Gate House

When Bill Hamilton bought a remote Mackenzie Country sheep station in 1921, livestock wasn’t his hardest problem for long. By 1927, needing electricity for a new homestead and workshop, he built a dam. But conventional earth-moving scoops couldn’t handle the job, so he invented his own excavator, the I.C. Excavator, which he then manufactured and sold in New Zealand and Britain. The dam powered his workshop, where during WWII he trained unskilled farmhands to produce precision munitions. Later, that same workshop birthed the modern jet boat, tested on the very dam he’d built decades earlier to solve a much simpler problem.

Hamilton always deflected credit for the invention itself, joking that Archimedes got there first. What he actually did was spend three decades solving one practical problem after another on an isolated sheep station, each solution quietly building toward the next, until a farmer frustrated by shallow rivers and ruined propellers ended up changing how boats move through water everywhere. The dam that once just kept the lights on became the proving ground for something that would outlast the sheep station’s ordinary reasons for existing.