The town of Hyden near Wave Rock bids us a fond farewell by toting out its significant locals to wave Goodbye. These locals are represented by statues made out of junk and are on display at the town entrance, as we leave headed for Kalgoorlie. A recycling manoeuvre that is positive and negative at the same time. So we leave the town’s locals quietly rusting away beside the highway.
Southern Cross is a town in Western Australia, 371 kilometres east of the state capital of Perth. It was founded by gold prospectors in 1888 gazetted in 1890. In the 2016 census, Southern Cross had a population of 680, but we think they have done away with each other! We agree that we’d like to have a pub lunch and stop here, selecting an old pub which looks very interesting from the outside. Try as we might though, we cannot find an open door in the building or indeed any sign of life at all. It is 2.00p.m. and we realise that we are on the end of any possible lunch session anyway, but the lack of human habitation is absurd. From one dusty window, I spy a fellow looking at us from across a room which is stacked up with chairs and tables. He doesn’t come forward or indicate that they are closed - perhaps he is a ghost!
One thing we have gotten used to in towns who got their success from gold mining is that they is never a shortage of pubs. The very next corner produces an even older and more rundown looking building. To our relief, we find that they are open for lunch if we place an order in the next five minutes. Later, they explain that the first pub we visited only opens for evening trading -a fact that the local obviously know. We are the only four in the pub, apart from a bar-fly and a bar girl together with a chubby cook who serves our lunches to our table prior to leaving for his afternoon off. It is provided to us in a dingy dining room overfull of aged furniture which creaks with lack of use. The pub has a very aged interior all round with faded pictures from years gone by. A particularly outraged but successful photo of someone is staring out at us from the mantelpiece. We assume he is probably an owner from time gone by and isn’t keen on company. An adjacent room is stacked up with catering detritus and provides access through to the kitchen. When I follow signs to the ladies toilet, I find a coin operated telephone from the 70’s tucked under an open staircase. A telephone like this where you insert 7c into the slots was in the Milk Bar our family ran, during my childhood.
This Pub reminds me of family holidays we took annually to the Victorian town of Bendigo during Easter. My parents never booked any accommodation before we arrived and the Easter weekend in Bendigo hosted a Carnival of flowers type of event which was always popular. We used to take the opportunity to visit my mother’s family friends during this holiday weekend, but they never offered us accommodation. I recall one year managing to get two rooms with two single beds each in separate pubs. Mum and I took one and my Dad and my brother took the other. The bar would throb through the ceiling all night. You would get a key to open your room and also a key to the ladies or gentlemen’s toilet and bathroom. Sometimes you’d wait laboriously for the bathroom to be free. These old pubs, even then were dusty and not well maintained, but they presented such exciting exploration opportunities for my brother and I as children and we always enjoyed that first few hours after arrival when mum and dad would be busy unpacking and we could do a bit of reconnoitring.
Successful gold rushes occurred in the Yilgarn region near Southern Cross in 1887, at Coolgardie in 1892, and at Kalgoorlie in 1893 which caused a population explosion in this bare and dry desert centre of Western Australia. The town is named after the Southern Cross constellation, and the town’s streets are named after constellations and stars. The surrounding areas produce wheat and other cereal crops, but apart from this, the surrounding lands are desolate and resemble the desert growth of the Nullarbor Plain which is not much further onward.
It’s hard to imagine men on horseback exploring so deeply into this vast, parched state but the search for Gold took them far and wide and was successful in many instances. We travel eastward feeling more than a bit spooked by our experiences in pubs which have seen much more successful days before we ever stepped into them.
Southern Cross is a town in Western Australia, 371 kilometres east of the state capital of Perth. It was founded by gold prospectors in 1888 gazetted in 1890. In the 2016 census, Southern Cross had a population of 680, but we think they have done away with each other! We agree that we’d like to have a pub lunch and stop here, selecting an old pub which looks very interesting from the outside. Try as we might though, we cannot find an open door in the building or indeed any sign of life at all. It is 2.00p.m. and we realise that we are on the end of any possible lunch session anyway, but the lack of human habitation is absurd. From one dusty window, I spy a fellow looking at us from across a room which is stacked up with chairs and tables. He doesn’t come forward or indicate that they are closed - perhaps he is a ghost!
One thing we have gotten used to in towns who got their success from gold mining is that they is never a shortage of pubs. The very next corner produces an even older and more rundown looking building. To our relief, we find that they are open for lunch if we place an order in the next five minutes. Later, they explain that the first pub we visited only opens for evening trading -a fact that the local obviously know. We are the only four in the pub, apart from a bar-fly and a bar girl together with a chubby cook who serves our lunches to our table prior to leaving for his afternoon off. It is provided to us in a dingy dining room overfull of aged furniture which creaks with lack of use. The pub has a very aged interior all round with faded pictures from years gone by. A particularly outraged but successful photo of someone is staring out at us from the mantelpiece. We assume he is probably an owner from time gone by and isn’t keen on company. An adjacent room is stacked up with catering detritus and provides access through to the kitchen. When I follow signs to the ladies toilet, I find a coin operated telephone from the 70’s tucked under an open staircase. A telephone like this where you insert 7c into the slots was in the Milk Bar our family ran, during my childhood.
This Pub reminds me of family holidays we took annually to the Victorian town of Bendigo during Easter. My parents never booked any accommodation before we arrived and the Easter weekend in Bendigo hosted a Carnival of flowers type of event which was always popular. We used to take the opportunity to visit my mother’s family friends during this holiday weekend, but they never offered us accommodation. I recall one year managing to get two rooms with two single beds each in separate pubs. Mum and I took one and my Dad and my brother took the other. The bar would throb through the ceiling all night. You would get a key to open your room and also a key to the ladies or gentlemen’s toilet and bathroom. Sometimes you’d wait laboriously for the bathroom to be free. These old pubs, even then were dusty and not well maintained, but they presented such exciting exploration opportunities for my brother and I as children and we always enjoyed that first few hours after arrival when mum and dad would be busy unpacking and we could do a bit of reconnoitring.
Successful gold rushes occurred in the Yilgarn region near Southern Cross in 1887, at Coolgardie in 1892, and at Kalgoorlie in 1893 which caused a population explosion in this bare and dry desert centre of Western Australia. The town is named after the Southern Cross constellation, and the town’s streets are named after constellations and stars. The surrounding areas produce wheat and other cereal crops, but apart from this, the surrounding lands are desolate and resemble the desert growth of the Nullarbor Plain which is not much further onward.
It’s hard to imagine men on horseback exploring so deeply into this vast, parched state but the search for Gold took them far and wide and was successful in many instances. We travel eastward feeling more than a bit spooked by our experiences in pubs which have seen much more successful days before we ever stepped into them.
I remember the lessons we undertook at school with regard to the towns of Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie, but all I remember from those times was the rhyming nature of the town names and never expecting that I would visit there. But here I am!! Coolgardie is a small town in Western Australia, 558 kilometres east of the state capital of Perth. It has a population of approximately 850 people. Although Coolgardie is now known to most Western Australians as a tourist town and a mining ghost town, it was once the third largest town in WA (after Perth and Fremantle). At that time, mining of alluvial gold was a major industry and supplied the flagging economy with new hope. By 1898, Coolgardie had a population of 5,008 and at its peak 700 mining companies were registered with the London Stock Exchange. By the early 1900’s, and by World War I, the town was in serious decline. The situation remained unchanged throughout the century. As its population slipped to around 200, it became a virtual ghost town. Coolgardie is an Aboriginal term meaning “water hole, “depression” or “hollow surrounded with mulga trees”. However in 1995 the “King of the West or Normandy Nugget” weighing in at 25.5kg - the world’s second largest existing nugget, was found in a creek bed at Coolgardie. It’s a wonder that there is so much Gold still around in these places where one would think that any obvious deposits would have long ago been mined into obscurity.
Another well known creation with the same name was the The Coolgardie Safe. This was a cold box for keeping items chilled. On the top of the safe there was a iron tray full of water. Hessian bags were hung out of the tray over the safe. As the bag soaked up the water and the wind blew through it, the water evaporated which provided a cool environment for goods to be kept safe.
Another well known creation with the same name was the The Coolgardie Safe. This was a cold box for keeping items chilled. On the top of the safe there was a iron tray full of water. Hessian bags were hung out of the tray over the safe. As the bag soaked up the water and the wind blew through it, the water evaporated which provided a cool environment for goods to be kept safe.
We finally arrive in our destination - the amalgamated city of Kalgoorlie/Boulder known colloquially as just Kalgoorlie. This city in the Goldfields-Esperance region of WA is located 595 km east-northeast of Perth at the end of the Great Eastern Highway. The city was founded in 1889 by the amalgamation of the towns of Kalgoorlie and Boulder, which developed in 1893. The city has a vibrant mix of gold rush history, grand colonial buildings and immense mining measures. Elegant and refined areas exist cheek-by-jowl with light industry and mining detritus . In 2018 Kalgoorlie had an estimated urban population of 29,849, a decline from a recent peak of 32,966 in 2013. The name “Kalgoorlie” is derived from the Wangai word Karlkurla or Kulgooluh, meaning place of the silky pears”
Kalgoorlie, originally called “Hannah’s Find” was first discovered In the winter of 1893, by prospectors Patrick (Paddy) Hannan, Tom Flanagan and Dan Shea who were travelling to Mount Youle, when one of their horses cast a shoe. During the halt in their journey, the men noticed signs of gold in the area around the foot of what is now the Mount Charlotte Gold Mine, located on a small hill north of the current city. They decided to stay and investigate. On 17th June 1893, Hannan filed a Reward Claim, leading to hundreds of men swarming the area in search of gold. He left his surname behind to enhance the Main Street of the town.
Kalgoorlie, originally called “Hannah’s Find” was first discovered In the winter of 1893, by prospectors Patrick (Paddy) Hannan, Tom Flanagan and Dan Shea who were travelling to Mount Youle, when one of their horses cast a shoe. During the halt in their journey, the men noticed signs of gold in the area around the foot of what is now the Mount Charlotte Gold Mine, located on a small hill north of the current city. They decided to stay and investigate. On 17th June 1893, Hannan filed a Reward Claim, leading to hundreds of men swarming the area in search of gold. He left his surname behind to enhance the Main Street of the town.
Due to time constraints, we will only be staying in Kalgoorlie for 40 hours and so we book into a “Super Pit” tour run by Kalgoorlie Tours & Charters which will give us a miner’s eye view of the mining pit that is in existence in Kalgoorlie. Originally consisting of a large number of underground mines, including the Paringa, Oriya, Brown Hill, Chaffers and Hainaut mines, consolidation into a single, large-scale, cost-effective open Pit mine was first attempted by Alan Bond, but he was unable to complete the task and sold the land. The Fimiston Open Pit colloquially known as the Super Pit, is now owned by Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mines Pty. Ltd. It covers 35,000 hectares of leases and is made up of around 260 individual mining leases linked together. It was Australia’s largest open cut gold mine until 2016 when it was surpassed by the Newmont Boddington Gold Mine. The pit is oblong in plain view and is approximately 3.5 kilometres long, 1.5 kilometres wide and over 600 metres deep. The mine produces 500,000 to 600,000 ounces of Gold (14,000 - 17,000 kilograms) of gold a year or 38 kilograms a day and employs around 800 employees who work 12 Hour shifts each day; 5:30am-5:30pm seven days on, seven days off, and then seven nights covering the same hours. The current life of the Mine is estimated to be operating until around 2034 but KCGM continues to look for opportunities to extend mine life. The final dimensions in current plans will see the Super Pit at 3.9 kilometres long, 1.6km wide and 700m deep.
We are taken by bus to an observation area where we can photograph the Super Pit. On the way there, we drive past the Tyre Change Out Facility. Truck tyres weigh around 5 tonnes each and it takes 45 minutes to change each tyre. We are also advised that each tyre costs $40,000 and will last about 7 months. The machinery is washed in salt water rather than drinking water due to the precious nature of the latter. The trucks last about 7 years before being retired. KCGM has a fuel farm on site with a capacity of 700,000 litres. All heavy equipment is fuelled up at the farm except for dozers and shovels which are refuelled by service trucks, presumably so that they can stay in place and keep on working! Each piece of equipment is monitored by a computer system from a device commonly known as a fuel ring that is installed on each piece of equipment to keep track of fuel usage. Each month the Mine uses about 5 to 6 million litres of diesel. One in seven trucks will carry valuable ore which might only be approximately the size of a golf ball - 500 grams. The remaining six truckloads will go to the waste dumps for crushing and transport via conveyor from the Super Pit to the Mt Charlotte Glory Hole beside it. The KCGM crush wasted rock and feed it back into the underground operations through the the glory hole in order to stabilise the area.
We are amazed at the breadth of this operation which is sustained year on year by what it takes out of the ground. It made me wonder what my Great Grandfather John Watson, who part owned the Garden Gully Mine in Bendigo in 1860 (and made his fortune over thirty years), might think of today’s operation and how big it has grown in every measure available to miners. From horses and pulley systems to huge trucks which constantly carry potentially gold bearing rock up steep roadways from deep in the ground. Nothing much has changed with regard to man’s endeavour to become rich, except perhaps the size of everything involved.
We are taken by bus to an observation area where we can photograph the Super Pit. On the way there, we drive past the Tyre Change Out Facility. Truck tyres weigh around 5 tonnes each and it takes 45 minutes to change each tyre. We are also advised that each tyre costs $40,000 and will last about 7 months. The machinery is washed in salt water rather than drinking water due to the precious nature of the latter. The trucks last about 7 years before being retired. KCGM has a fuel farm on site with a capacity of 700,000 litres. All heavy equipment is fuelled up at the farm except for dozers and shovels which are refuelled by service trucks, presumably so that they can stay in place and keep on working! Each piece of equipment is monitored by a computer system from a device commonly known as a fuel ring that is installed on each piece of equipment to keep track of fuel usage. Each month the Mine uses about 5 to 6 million litres of diesel. One in seven trucks will carry valuable ore which might only be approximately the size of a golf ball - 500 grams. The remaining six truckloads will go to the waste dumps for crushing and transport via conveyor from the Super Pit to the Mt Charlotte Glory Hole beside it. The KCGM crush wasted rock and feed it back into the underground operations through the the glory hole in order to stabilise the area.
We are amazed at the breadth of this operation which is sustained year on year by what it takes out of the ground. It made me wonder what my Great Grandfather John Watson, who part owned the Garden Gully Mine in Bendigo in 1860 (and made his fortune over thirty years), might think of today’s operation and how big it has grown in every measure available to miners. From horses and pulley systems to huge trucks which constantly carry potentially gold bearing rock up steep roadways from deep in the ground. Nothing much has changed with regard to man’s endeavour to become rich, except perhaps the size of everything involved.